“Red Hot Patriot” at the Aurora Fox Arts Center Studio theater is a perfect example of why the stage is so different from the cinema. Theater brings the dead back to life.

There I was Saturday night in the small East Colfax venue and guess who I spent the evening with? Molly Ivins. Yes, I did. In the flesh.

Now, please, do an aging newspaperman the courtesy of not asking who Ivins was. The patron saint of smartness, Ivins was the embodiment of every reason journalists take up the mantle — to call out stupidity, get our names in the paper and tell stories.

Ivins, the outrageous political columnist who graced the staffs of The Texas Observer, Minneapolis Star Tribune, New York Times, Dallas Times Herald, The Fort Worth Star-Telegram — and about 350 other papers across the country — was alive and raising hell on Colfax over the weekend, and she will be through March 15.

Breast cancer killed her in 2007, but journalist-playwrights Margaret Engel and Allison Engel summoned her back from the dead in the one-woman show, “Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins.”

The Everyman Theater Co. and R&R Productions breathed life into Molly at the Fox for this four-week run with metro-area actress Rhonda Brown. The role was originated by Kathleen Turner in 2012 for three months when the play opened in Washington D.C.

Unsurprisingly, the show is a 90-minute love letter to liberalism. But what was a surprise is that rather then regurgitate decades of Ivins’ caustic, provocative wit, the play is peppered with some of her best lines. It’s a story that takes the audience through almost 40 years of political and journalism history. “Patriot” is a quick ride through women’s and civil rights, the Vietnam War, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and the man that became her signature target, George W. “Shrub” Bush, aka “Dubya.”

While the one-woman show meanders among those milestones, the play actually works to explain how Molly’s life of privilege, intellectualism, familial malfunction, drinking and education put her on a path of fighting eternally for the underdog.

Brown, sporting Wranglers, flashy cowboy boots and rust-colored hair, flawlessly cavorts through the show and into the audience as Ivins. The effect is mesmerizing as she spits out old favorites such as the zinger about Texas Congressman James Collins: “If his IQ slips any lower we’ll have to water him twice a day.”

Brown channels the rolling, brogue-like Texas drawl of Ivins and the likes of former Texas Gov. Ann Richards. Like Ivins, Brown is never pithy or cruel. She relishes the mirth and cunning that Ivins drew seemingly effortlessly into her writing. Ivins was comically at war with everyone in authority, credited to a dysfunctional relationship with her overbearing father. The show includes projected photographs of Ivins, her family and some of her favorite targets, enhancing the perception that Ivins happened to dropped in to tell you the story of her life.

The spell is broken only when a supposed wire-service teletype machine goes off, which would supposedly clang news alert bells and curry type off-stage, a device used to move the story along. It was distracting because it left the audience trying to count how many bells chimed, and it was odd because newsrooms carried out the last of the clackity teletype machines long before Ivins died.

Other than that, the play is a fun, funny and an affectionate evening spent in Ivins’ ratty old newspaper office. It’s an evening of remembering just how dark the Vietnam War really was, how trite and corrupt American politics has pretty much always been, and how common sense seems to escape so much of what America frets over. While Ivins’ politics were clear, like her, the show has universal appeal to anyone that was conscious for the past four decades. While conservatives were her favorite targets, her lashings were disarming but not disparaging. Brown, as Ivins, plays that up, making it clear that we are all deserving of being laughed at.

Much more than a lark, the play works to give understanding and depth to a method that infuriated and elated so many readers and politicians for so many years.

The show ends with bits from Ivins’ last column, which essentially summed up her life’s work and philosophy, demanding to know where the outrage is about the Iraq War, and telling readers that it is we who are “the deciders.”

It wasn’t a suggestion, it was a command to go out and raise some hell. It was inspiring to have Ivins in the Studio theater to bark the orders herself. And that’s what theater is all about. You might some day see Ivins at the cinema in a future movie version of the play, but you’ll never get to spend the evening with her in person like you can right now at the Fox on Colfax.

[wc_fa icon=”star” margin_left=”” margin_right=””][/wc_fa][wc_fa icon=”star” margin_left=”” margin_right=””][/wc_fa][wc_fa icon=”star” margin_left=”” margin_right=””][/wc_fa][wc_fa icon=”star-half-full” margin_left=”” margin_right=””][/wc_fa][wc_fa icon=”star-o” margin_left=”” margin_right=””][/wc_fa]

Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins

Through March 15
Fridays and Saturdays 7:30pm; Sundays 2pm
Tickets: $14-$31
In the Aurora Fox Studio Theatre
9900 East Colfax Avenue
303-739-1970
aurorafoxartscenter.org