The Lady With All the Answers

Over the years, the Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s resident actress Laura Gordon has played queens, servants, at least one doctor and now, thanks to David Rambo’s one-woman play The Lady With All the Answers, the legendary advice columnist Ann Landers. On a cozy set designed like an office/living room from the early ’70s, Gordon orchestrates Landers’ informality with a practiced sense of rhythm and timing. The script allows her moments of comedy and tragedy. There’s no over-the-top intensity here, but there doesn’t need to be. It’s just Landers and her audience mixing together for an engrossing evening that explores the nature of intimacy in the last half of the 20th century.