Out of the box
Alum's play (almost) as eclectic as her life

By Breanne Smith

Ann Randolph, BGS '86, has led an unusual life.

She lived in a mental hospital while in college and suffered hypothermia in Alaska. She played the banjo in New York subways and worked with the notable comedy troupe The Groundlings. Now thanks to the success of her play, "Squeeze Box," she has a movie deal with Mel Brooks and is poised to become a household name. Although her one-woman show is filled with quirky anecdotes, her past holds even more.

As a student at Ohio University, Randolph often spent her days at the Athens State Mental Hospital on The Ridges, where she received free room and board in exchange for taking chronic schizophrenic patients on road trips and helping them write and perform plays as a form of therapy. She would take them to see her student performances or to hear live music in town.

Because of her unusual work experience, Randolph chose to create her own major to cater to her special interest in writing plays.

"The conventional major was more into studying classic playwrights," she says. "That just wasn't for me."

Today, she is the acclaimed creator of "Squeeze Box," which she performed in Athens in July. The show re-enacts segments of Randolph's life, focusing mainly on her work in a homeless women's shelter and her romance with an accordion player.

Although Randolph limits the life experiences included in the play in order to keep it to a manageable time, it clearly shows how her history is filled with an excess of eccentric happenings -- and her unique college experience is just the beginning of the story.

During her senior year, the Loveland, Ohio, native saw an advertisement in the back of The Post that said willing workers could make thousands of dollars in a short amount of time in Alaska. She convinced her parents to buy her a one-way ticket as a graduation gift.

"I figured I'd make enough money while I was there to buy a ticket back," Randolph says.

The money was harder to make than she thought. She started work at a fish cannery sliming fish. She showed up to the job in a pair of pink, high-heeled fashion boots, hoping to garner attention from the young men working there. She got their attention all right: When freezing water kept sloshing into her boots, she passed out from hypothermia.

Her stay in a pup tent at the cannery saved her rent, but it took a while to build up enough to fulfill her dream of going to New York City to pursue a career in theater. When the time came, she advertised in New York papers as an "Alaskan bushwoman" looking for a free place to stay. She had a lot of replies, but perhaps the best (and seemingly safest) offer came from a woman looking for a companion to live with her aging father in his Central Park West apartment.

Randolph took the position, and when she was especially in need of money, she would wear a bright orange wig and play banjo in the subway.

After working in Alaska a second time -- this time cleaning up after the Exxon Valdez spill -- she traveled to New Mexico and built an outdoor stage in the mountains. It was there she had her first solo show, "Down Home," a play about people and traditional music in Appalachia.

She moved to California and worked for a homeless women's shelter in Santa Monica, where she was able to sleep on a cot after all of the women had gone to bed. She had escaped paying rent once again -- but it wasn’t a frugal nature that made her do this.

"Without having to spend money on rent, I could use my money to produce my shows," Randolph says.

She worked with The Groundlings, a comedy group that then included comedians Will Ferrell, Cheri Oteri and Chris Kattan. While the shows were funny, Randolph grew tired of the rivalry and the skits without depth.

"It was competitive," Randolph says. "People would count jokes in a skit, and if you had one more than they did, it became an issue."

Instead, she began writing about the women in the shelter and her coworkers' struggles.

"I wanted to let people know how it is to be doing the best you can and still not making it," she says.

Occasionally, she would save enough money to rent out a theater for one night and pack audiences to see her productions. She also began to teach writing workshops. An admiring student brought her in-laws, Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft, to one of Randolph's performances and introduced them to Randolph. Brooks and Bancroft enjoyed the performance so much that they purchased the movie and stage rights to "Squeeze Box."

The show, which has been playing off-Broadway, came to Athens this July when Randolph visited to see a reunion show of a former boyfriend’s band at Casa Cantina.

The play's audience packed ARTS/West on West State Street. Randolph played characters ranging from a minister's wife gone insane to Harold, a stiff accordionist trying to romance Randolph. Her characters were easily distinguishable by her amazing changes in facial expression. However, the audience members may have failed to notice the nuances of her performance, as they were usually teary-eyed from laughing so hard at the character Brandy, a "paranoid crack whore," or crying at the tragedy of poverty and homelessness.

"To explain it, it sounds like the show is about an accordionist and homelessness," Randolph says. "It's about so much more than that."

The play continues to tour the country, and steps toward movie production with Brooks are under way.

For more information on Ann Randolph or to learn how to bring her show to your area, visit www.annrandolph.com.

Breanne Smith, BSJ '08, is a student writer with Ohio Today.