"Whatever the day demands, I call duty!" wrote Johann Wolfgang Goethe.

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My longtime pal, the actress Holland Taylor, who plays the randy mother of the two leading guys on "Two and a Half Men," has been busy for the past year – when she isn’t acting – writing her own one-woman show based on the life and times of the late Ann Richards, former governor of Texas. So Holland has spent a lot of time in Austin talking to Ann’s coterie of friends and plowing through boxes of Ann’s archives in the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History. (This stuff would fill four football fields!)

Holland writes: "I came to know her as a living, breathing person who was a mother and a wife, then a divorced wife and a boss and a fun friend. I had no idea, for instance, how difficult she was. And what a temper she had. Every person I interviewed started out with some terrible story about some unbelievably difficult moment or some terrible time when they got dressed down by Ann. When they ran from her bawling and hid in a broom closet. Whenever they were telling this story about how she was mean as a snake to them, their faces beamed with beautiful smiles and their eyes were full of tears. Because they loved her so much."


Holland and Liz

Ms. Taylor believes Gov. Ann could depend on personal loyalty, in part because of her own essential decency. "She drove everyone, but they all knew she was working harder. They also knew that her core values were so central, her core sense of fair play so correct. Her lifelong dream was of a fair and just society … as far as civil rights were concerned; she believed she had to help right a great wrong."

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Holland started writing her drama of Ann last March. "It wasn’t that I felt ready. I’d been fitting the research into a fairly busy life already. And a job, and I’m not a kid. I could have gone on and on with the research. But I thought I better get this done. This demands absolutely everything I’ve got."

Ms. Taylor is already grieving about how much of Ann’s story won’t make it into the play. "I came into the room where I work, formerly the guest room in my house. Now it’s Ann’s room. All of her stuff is in there. Stacks and stacks of DVDs, papers, files, notes, reprints, references, books. And I realized, all the things I know now, so many wonderful Ann details – and God is in the details – I can’t put them in the play. It’s 100 minutes; I can’t get them in.

"Then I calmed down. I realized I had to gather all those things so I could know her. So what I do include is true. It’s not only true but well chosen.

"It’s not a narrative, or history. It’s a play. The things I have her talk about are often homely details – the things that interested me. This is a play, not a comprehensive biography, which journalist Jan Reid is already writing. If I had to write a biography of Ann, I’d be home by now. The scope for a play is just too great. What amuses me is in the play. It adds up to a coherent impression."


Liz and Ann/Image:Joan Jedell

Holland is shooting for a workshop without scenery or projections to be announced before Christmas. A commercial production will follow. The actress then has to memorize virtually every line, although there will be some offstage voices. "My agent has utter confidence this will be given a commercial production in New York, but I’m not even thinking of that or feeling any yen for it yet. For now it’s all about today and stepping up to what Goethe called ‘duty.’