In August 2002, Kathryn Pryor got a handwritten note on Sixth Judicial District Court letterhead, the courtroom of Circuit Judge John Plegge. "Kathryn," it went, "you really should give up your day job ..."
A partner at Wright, Lindsey & Jennings, she'd had three or four trials in that courtroom, and "I loved trying cases in front of Judge Plegge." Here was this esteemed jurist telling her to hang it up. All the hours hunkered over books of case law, in mock trials, in real trials, wrangling witnesses -- just, wow, what a dagger!
That is, if the note had ended there.
"Kathryn, you really should give up your day job and go to Broadway. Great number in the Gridiron. JP."
The Little Rock Gridiron is a limited-run sketch comedy musical put on every other year by the Pulaski County Bar Association. It stars lawyers with desultory stagecraft spoofing local and national figures, typically lawmakers. The Huckabees and Clintons have been mainstays for years, as have all the Bushes, and of course, any of the state's congressional caucus. This year, Aug. 13-16, expect to see firebrand state Sen. Jason Rapert, both gubernatorial and both U.S. Senate candidates, some state Supremes, Razorbacks Coaches Bret Bielema and Mike Anderson, and of course, Barack and Michelle Obama.
If Josh McHughes represents the lovably low end of the talent graph, Kathryn Pryor sets the bar, excuse the expression. No one sings with more chops, or spoofs with more oomph, or commands the stage like Pryor. She has played Barbra Streisand, Janet Huckabee, Laura Bush, Blanche Lincoln, Sarah Palin -- even local philanthropist and hat fancier Willie Oates. When in 2008 her turn as Hillary Clinton was called "a transcendent piece of musical theater" in this newspaper, it was straight praise and almost surely the highest any Gridiron cast member ever got in print.
"I think she has a superhuman singing voice," three-time Tony Award-winning Broadway producer Will Trice says. "Yeah, I still have never heard anything like her voice, and I guess something that can be kind of surprising with her -- she's very petite, but like her mother, she has a big presence ... both vocally and as a personality on stage. She can play those big roles like Mamma Rose and Mrs. Lovett."
Trice and Pryor, it should be said, share the same mother.
Judy Edwards' daughter was born in Fayetteville. Edwards and Birnie Pryor were students at the University of Arkansas.
They married and, before Kathryn Pryor can remember, the family moved to Tulsa, where Judy Pryor was a television personality -- a weather forecaster on KOTV and co-host of a show modeled on American Bandstand called Dance Party. When the couple divorced, Mom got a job at KATV and moved her children (Kathryn and brother Jeff) to Little Rock. For a time, she hosted This Morning With Judy Pryor. Then she became a sidekick on The Vic Ames Show. Eventually, she married lawyer Bill Trice.
She still acts in commercials and has had bit parts in Elizabethtown and Sling Blade. She has her Equity and Screen Actors Guild cards.
When Pryor matriculated at the university in Fayetteville, she followed her mother's lead and majored in broadcast journalism. When she was a year out of college and a director of radio and television relations at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, she and a college friend moved to New York to see if they could make a go of it acting/dancing/singing. Instead, she lived the quintessential office pool life.
"I see now what you'd have to go through to get your body and your mind trained for that kind of career in that kind of place. My voice, I hadn't done much with it ... and I think you grow with experience. I was naive," she says. "I got to answer phones in the Empire State Building and actually got offered a job as receptionist. It's kind of funny, I think it was because of the accent."
She auditioned for the Light Opera of Manhattan and got a callback, but by then she'd already returned home.
MAZDA SEATBELTS
Inside her corner office on the 24th floor of the Bank of America building, Pryor can see the airport. It's nice, she says -- to wonder where folks are off to, where she might be off to next.
On her wall, in a photo taken at her wedding reception, she's speaking to then-Arkansas first lady Hillary Clinton (Pryor and Jeffrey Gearhart divorced in 1991 and she hasn't remarried). There's also a framed letter from Clinton (a polite and lengthy rejection she wrote in response to Pryor's invitation to speak at a national legal conference for the American Law Firm Association), a leafless potted oak sapling from Arbor Day, and a framed photo of the 1989 partner class at Wright, Lindsey & Jennings that includes her, Sen. Mark Pryor (no relation), federal Judge Jay Moody, Troy Price and Tricia Harris.
One of her favorite artifacts is the hubcap from an '80s model Mazda coupe.
Following in the footsteps of her stepfather, she enrolled in the University of Arkansas at Little Rock School of Law where she distinguished herself, writing the top paper in her torts class. Torts is the area of law dealing with claims for personal injury and property damage, which is what Pryor defends against today for clients such as DuPont and Sunbeam. In her third and final year, she was picked for the team representing the school at national mock trial competitions.
The hubcap carries an engraved brass plate that reads "Hiatt v. Mazda" and "U.S.D.C. Little Rock, 1994." It was given to her by Roger Glasgow, who was trial team leader in a case the firm won against a teenager who sued Mazda after suffering significant abdominal injuries caused by a backseat, two-point belt in a single-car crash.
Glasgow and Pryor flew over a Japanese engineer from Okinawa who required a translator to testify. The plaintiff's attorney, Darrell "Chip" Baker, brought in a biomechanical engineer to testify that the injuries resulted from the seatbelt sliding up over the abdomen on impact. Pryor handled both witnesses' examinations. Ultimately, the jury did not find fault with the car company.
"Chip Baker, every time I see him at some meeting, he always mentions that case," Glasgow says.
"A heartbreaking case for me," Baker says.
"She and I tried several big cases together. I started out just trying to get her familiar with being in front of the jury ... I realized very quickly that she was an extraordinarily good trial lawyer," Glasgow says. "In fact, I don't believe we lost a case working together."
For this reason, perhaps, she was invited last year to join the International Society of Barristers, an invitation-only group that requires its members to maintain an A rating with the Martindale-Hubbell Law Directory, the Who's Who of litigators. She's Arkansas president of the American Board of Trial Advocates.
"She doesn't come across as harsh. She does come across as knowledgeable, and forceful without being pushy or unlikable," Baker says. "There are a lot of lawyers that can be awfully abrasive in the courtroom, and juries don't like them. ... You know, her stage presence carries over to the courtroom. She's someone people are drawn to. That's an asset in any profession but certainly trying lawsuits."
WORKING FOR THE WEEKEND
"What you have with lawyers [is] some frustrated actors who went into law because show business is terrible," says Judge Mary Spencer McGowan, who has produced Gridiron shows for two decades. "She is somebody that I think, if she'd decided to jump in and go the show business route, she could have made it, and by make it I mean she could have had a substantial career on either coast."
On a recent weekday, Pryor visited The Weekend Theater, where she has performed for nearly two decades. It's less than 10 city blocks away from her 24th floor office.
There, in the black-and-red playhouse lobby, is a large closeup still from her turn as Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd.
"That was one of my favorite roles you ever played, Kathryn," says Kim Labbatt, the nonprofit theater's board president and, this day, principal concession stocker. "But I liked you in Cabaret, too."
"I have really been blessed at The Weekend Theater to have sung some great songs," she says. "Great, great songs."
In 1993, at a time when Arkansas Repertory Theatre was beginning to fill leads with professional talent scouted in Chicago and New York, Ralph Hyman opened The Weekend Theater, a playhouse for those without Equity cards, for those, like himself (a doctor of psychology) with "real" jobs. While The Rep picks its shows with an eye toward market forces -- will people pay to see this? -- The Weekend Theater would only do "hardhitting social-issue shows," Hyman says.
Three of his earliest acolytes were Judy and Bill Trice, and Pryor. "They breathe theater," he says.
In 2007, Pryor and brother Will Trice did a cabaret act in upstate New York based on real-life brother-sister act Fred and Adele Astaire. "I was at one point toying with moving" to New York, she says, but spending a week each month for a year and a half scratched that itch.
'DIG AT THE CORE'
In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera wrote, "We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come." But as closely as she could fix it, Pryor has set about living two lives at once.
In one, she has been led by her wits, and in the other, her soul.
Gordon Rather, a fellow partner at Wright, Lindsey & Jennings and a trial team leader, and Hyman have separately concluded it's a mistake to think either of her lives is exclusive of, or a departure from, the other.
"Jurors are constantly evaluating the performance of trial lawyers just like audiences judge a performance on stage. Kathryn's strength is her ability to perform under that kind of pressure," Rather says.
"Kathryn's natural brilliance helped her both in law and in theater. She's got a fantastic memory ... raw skills so far beyond most people's. Emotional intelligence and intellectual intelligence both," Hyman says.
But let no one aver that she ever becomes an actor before a jury. "I'm sure [stage training] helps you get up in front of a jury ... but you're not performing. You can't. You have to be completely sincere."
Years ago a director approached her about a character Pryor describes as "just really rank." She thought about it, but turned him down. "It's a small state," she says, "with rural judges."
Compare that to her role as a Death Row inmate in the 1996 Gridiron who sings a plea for reconsidering capital sentences to "Wouldn't It Be Loverly" from My Fair Lady. She went through with it, though she admits now it might have been too controversial.
It don't matter her reasons why
she sinned big, now she's gotta fry
"My life, they'll end, who'll cry?"
Her life, we'll end, no lie.
"There's naught to gain by killing me."
There's much to gain by killing thee.
"I don't believe in the death penalty, I mean, but that's kind of what the Gridiron is about. It's supposed to dig at the core on some things."
This year's show, too, will no doubt be strung with barbs, jibes and caricature. Pryor has been asked to reprise her role as Hillary Clinton, no doubt anticipating the 2008 candidate's second presidential run. It's awful close to home, really -- two lawyers, women, the famous one having attended the actor's wedding -- but trust Pryor to sidestep any controversy or blowback if it too much "digs at the core." She has been doing this a while.
No judge has yet sent her a note on official letterhead suggesting she quit performing.
"One thing we have in common is we both have artistic interests and love the theater and love music and performing, but neither of us perform as a vocation," says Will Trice, who before producing Tony Award-winning plays was in hedge funds. "We both appreciate the avocational artist who has other interests, other pursuits. It's funny, our mother is similar in that way, and so was our father. Our mother is an incredible performer but had another life teaching for many years and broadcasting many years before that."
High Profile on 07/27/2014