With a voice that sounds like it was sandpapered raw by whiskey and cigarettes, Kathleen Turner brings the hard-drinking Molly Ivins to life in Margaret Engel and Allison Engel’s “Red Hot Patriot” at the Geffen Playhouse.

You might now know directly who Ivins is, but she’s the one credited with giving George W. Bush the name “shrub.”

The Engels are twins and both were newspaper reporters, following different paths. Allison was at the Des Moines Tribune, the San Jose Mercury and Pacific News Service. She was at USC as the director of communications until she became the associate director of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities there. Margaret was at the Washington Post, Des Moines Register and the Lorain Journal. She directed the Alicia Patterson Journalism Foundation.

Their admiration for the flamboyant Molly Ivins is apparent and if you need a shot in the creative writing arm, then this play is a guaranteed booster shot. Ivins was a California girl by birth (born in Monterey), but was raised in and around Houston, Texas. Under the authoritarian rule of her father, General Jim–not military man, but an oil executive, she and her older sister and brother went to the best schools and had trips to Europe. She went to all the upper class functions like the debutant balls “or some such other virgin sacrifice.”

Tall and beautiful, Ivins was more interested in raising hell than winning beauty pageants, if only to give men like her father heartburn.

Turner is dressed in tight black jeans over Republican red boots. An untucked light blue denim shirt shows off her reddish hair, curled and kept in place by hairspray no doubt. I’ve heard the big hair in Texas is what keeps Aquanet afloat and the ozone layer endangered.

In this intermissionless 75 minutes, Turner’s Ivins takes us through her tough times as she butts heads with her father, every guy in the editorial room, scandalizes the New York Times when she tries to shake up their staid style and then gets back to “the pleasant vulgarity of Texas” and digs into politics.

John Arnone’s set design is a mostly clear stage, with old gray metal corporate desks with chairs stacked in the back, just in front of the white screen where we see projections of Ivins, her family, friends and adversaries. Ivins sits at a similar desk, painted white and she’s typing on a heavy gray metal typewriter.

That in itself might seem quaint to younger audience members. When she says that writing is 75 percent thinking, she’s not simply justifying procrastinating. A computer allows you to cut and paste, but in the days of typewriters, there were outlines and careful planning before typing the full story up. Yet why is she typing if we are in “2007 and earlier”?

Ivins earned her B.A. at Smith in 1966 and got her master’s degree in journalism from Columbia. She had already spent three summers interning at the Houston Chronicle. After Columbia, she worked at the Minneapolis Tribune. By 1970, she was back in Texas, at the Texas Observer based in Austin, the capital of Texas.

In 1976, she went to the New York Times where she wrote the obituary for Elvis Presley. By 1981, she was back in Texas, this time as a columnist at the Dallas Times Herald. When the Herald closed, she began writing a column from Austin for a Forth Worth paper, (Fort Worth Star-Telegram) and this column eventually became syndicated, making her an independent journalist.

The Engels’ play doesn’t touch on the accusation of plagiarism (in 1995) and while there are a lot of good one-liners and colorful anecdotes, the piece doesn’t flow very well. The notion of the helper, a slender young man who comes in from time to time and hands Ivins the printout from a vintage AP machine is contrived. There’s no easy rise to a conclusion and the ending revelation can be guessed but does nothing to evaluate who and what Ivins was.

Director David Esbjornson could tighten up the pace a bit–it sags here and there in a way that seems more from lack of focus than for a pregnant thoughtful pause. There are some of those, too. Ivins love life was filled with tragedy and ultimately, 2007 wasn’t a good year for Ivins. I won’t spoil the ending for you.

While the Engels’ “Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins” isn’t perfect theater, for writers it’s one way to kick start your metaphor-making mindset if you weren’t lucky enough to be born or raised in Texas.

“Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins” continues until 12 February 2012, at the Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Avenue, Los Angeles, California 90024.

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Here’s some videos of the real Molly Ivins.