Living in the Moment

The stagecraft of consummate actor Ann Marie Hall.

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To the surprise of no one, Ann Marie Hall was named this year’s recipient of the Ostranders’ Eugart Yerian Lifetime Achievement Award, recognizing a local theater person who seems to be in everything, everywhere.

And if you’ve attended even just a few local productions over the years, you’re very likely to have seen her or enjoyed something she’s directed. She calls herself the “consummate community actor,” and it would be futile to argue since she’s been on stages all over town for comedies, dramas, and even musicals although she’s not, by her admission, a singer.

She is not one to agonize over a role; she just goes after it with zeal. But her view of the craft is crystallized in her approach to a one-woman play she took on in 1994. It was The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, Lily Tomlin’s 1970s-era solo show, and two-and-a-half hours of solid, unremitting stage work.

It involved Hall becoming some 14 different characters. “And you just play it,” she says. “You just play it that way by yourself.” Wardrobe consists of one outfit, so no costume changes, and there’s a nearly bare set. “Right off the bat, we knew the cast parties were gonna suck,” she cracks. “They even asked if I wanted somebody backstage to help. The intermissions were intolerable — I’d take a minute, and then go to the bathroom, and then I’d have a drink of water. And then we still had two more minutes and I was, oh man, I’ve got to get my energy out there.”

“Anybody who tells you it’s not about ego, they’re lying. It’s ego. It’s all about ego.”

So she had only herself — solo on stage, solo backstage. “I would stand there every night and I’d think, just take the first step when that light comes on. Put your foot out there and do it. It’s a ride, just go for that ride, just get on it. And when you’re on it, like my acting teacher told me, you live in that moment. You can’t let those words come out of your mouth and think, ‘Oh, I just said that wrong,’ because you’re going to miss the next thing. And if you think about the next thing, you’re not going to think about where you are at the moment. I just live in that moment and just trust that all of the work has got you there so that when you start speaking, the right things are going to come out. Because if you mess up, there’s no one to pull you out.” 

If that doesn’t sound like fun, you’d be mistaken. Being on the stage is in Hall’s blood and she gives it her all. (She says: “Anybody who tells you it’s not about ego, they’re lying. It’s ego. It’s all about ego.”) In fact, she’s been at it since the eighth grade at St. Paul Catholic School in Whitehaven. “It seemed like I was always getting in trouble for acting out and I spent a lot of time at the principal’s office,” she says. “I was probably talking too much and doing my impersonation of something I saw on television the night before. And the teacher would just point down the hall and I’d say, ‘I know, I know, I’m going.’”

If you give her a choice, she’ll do a comedy. “I want to have fun,” she says. “I want to hear people laugh.”

One year, a teacher decided to put on a play that was a version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. “I got myself in there playing the witch who was being used by the evil stepmother to get her vengeance on Snow White,” she says. “It was a very silly role and I got to do very silly things. One of them, I had to wear a bald-head mask. So when they bring the heart of Snow White in, I’d put it in my cauldron and say it was going to grow my hair back. And when I stuck my head in there, I’d switch to another bald mask with pigtails on it because it was really a pig’s heart — they couldn’t really kill Snow White! That got me hooked because I realized I could be really silly and people would laugh at me — and I wouldn’t get in trouble.”

She knew then what her path was. Hall does serious dramatic roles, but she insists that if you give her a choice, she’ll do a comedy. “I want to have fun,” she says. “I want to hear people laugh.”

Her plan was to spend a couple of years at then-Memphis State University doing theater. And then she’d be off to UCLA to become a movie star. Instead, still lacking 12 hours for her bachelor of fine arts degree in theater, she moved to Atlanta for more stage work. But a year or so later she was back, finished her degree, and pressed on.

Hall’s time at Memphis State was something of a golden age. “I went to school right after Memphis State was put on the map for doing Hair. Keith Kennedy had produced the musical there and I came right on the tail end of that. I was there with Gloria Baxter and I was 17 years old.” Her first show at Memphis State was The Good Woman of Setzuan by Bertolt Brecht, what Hall calls a baptism by fire. “Even then I thought, I like doing this,” she says. “This is fun.”

For a while she was thinking how this was the life for her and if she could just make a living at it, it would all be good. While trying to figure out how to do that, she returned to Atlanta to visit some friends who were busy auditioning, and she found herself with them in a bar buying everybody drinks. “I was making $75 a week selling Elvis Presley postcards in Memphis,” she says. “And I realized I had more fun doing a job where I just make some money and then I get to do theater when I feel like it.”

All her efforts to go elsewhere were doomed. She never made it to UCLA; she went to New York, and came back. She kept getting work in Memphis, not only on stage but in commercials and videos and voiceovers.

She became, dare we say, a local institution. And she is no longer selling Elvis postcards.

To get the job that would subsidize her passion, Hall did make another trip to Atlanta for a few months to get paralegal training, “in which they cram 43 years of law school in your head for four months.” When she went to work at a law firm, the age of desktop computers was dawning and she was intrigued. “I went, ‘Oh, I know how these work.’ And this is how I’ve done it all my life: Let’s see how this works. So I learned how to use computers and software and all that and then later went to work doing that at the University of Memphis.”

A theater person as an IT geek? Yeah, yeah, Hall gets that all the time.

“It’s great work for a theater person,” she insists. “I tell them that all the time and they say, but you do this acting stuff. And I say, yes, but actors are great. You want to hire actors because we’re resilient and imaginative and can figure ways to make things work. And we can actually communicate to people. So if you work in IT and you do that, you’re ahead of the game. They just look at me funny.”

Troubleshooting tech has other advantages for the theater person. “You give me software and something I can learn, and I can show people how to do it and I can find the intricacies of the problem trying to fix it,” Hall says. “It’s the same thing as directing a show. I take the show apart and put everything in a spreadsheet about who’s playing what roles and where I want them to go. Everything is logistics to me. And that works both sides of my brain. And then when I act I just get to be silly.”

Another important reason she left the law firm and went to the U of M: time to pursue her passion. “Law firms are kind of stodgy,” she says wryly, “but I get a lot of vacation and leave time working for the state.” It’s turned out to be the right blend.

In the late 1990s, she met the actress Erin Gray (Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Silver Spoons) while shooting Woman’s Story in Memphis and Arkansas. She told Gray about her life, then working full-time at a law firm, being in the film, and also working on a play, catching naps between scene rehearsals.

Gray told her, “You’ve got this house, this good job, you’re doing the theater, you’re doing this film. You’ve got a great life.” And I said, “Yeah, I get to do the things I love to do and I don’t have to worry about it. I’m not living in New York and beating the stones trying to get by.”

And what was true then is true now.

Hall has directed and appeared in dozens of productions. One of the notables is the musical Side Show, which she directed at Theatre Memphis in 2017. It’s based on the story of Daisy and Violet Hilton, conjoined twins who became famous stage performers in the 1930s, and Hall was drawn to it for its “deeper meaning of the idea about being yourself and being recognized because it has the whole freak show aspect to it.” Hall says she was surrounded by excellence, from Gia Welch and Dani Chaum as the young sisters to Jack Yates’ set wizardry to Jeremy Fisher’s lighting. “It was a joy,” she says.

“Once I got up and was flying, it was the best thing in the world. I made a point of not looking down, but looking out and seeing that audience. And I just believed that I could fly.”

In fact, Hall doesn’t have much room for phobias or neuroses that some actors have been known to grapple with. Not even that special anxiety known as stage fright.

“I don’t really have it,” she says. “I’m not afraid to talk in front of people. I’m not a musical person, so I’m not a singer, and I think that probably would make me more nervous than anything. But fortunately, whenever anybody asks me to sing, it’s in something like Nunsense. It’s stupid and I can make it funny.”

But there is this thing about heights. “A little fear of heights,” she allows. That came into play in 2018 when she starred in the title role of For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday, an updated version of the Peter Pan story. (She is quick to point out that she played older than she actually is.)

It required her to hook up to the cable and take flight, as Peter Pans always do. “I decided that it’s about trust and I trusted the people that were pulling me up in the air and hauling me about,” she says. “And once I got up and was flying, it was the best thing in the world. I made a point of not looking down, but looking out and seeing that audience. And I just believed that I could fly.”

The 2020 Ostranders were virtual, as has been the case with so much in our lives this year. Normally Hall would have gotten up on the stage of the Orpheum and cracked jokes and thanked people. This year, though, she videotaped her speech lounging in her pool, cracking jokes and thanking people. And wearing a couple of hats in the process. She is very fond of hats.

What is she looking forward to when the pandemic passes and some semblance of normal returns? Acting in Lifespan of a Fact and directing Urinetown are on her agenda.

“But I’m not one of these people that has like this bucket list of, ‘Oh, one day I must play Lady Macbeth!’” she says. “I’m really good about people coming to me and asking what I think about this or that. And I go, ‘Oh, that sounds good. Yeah, let’s do that.’”