The New Play Perot! American Patriot Explores the Legendary Texan's Life, Legacy and Ambition

Henry Ross Perot's family name is all over the state of Texas.

The Perot Museum of Nature and Science was named for Perot and his wife Margot when the family gave a $50 million gift to the institution. According to his foundation's website, he's given a small fortune to medical institutions that have saved countless lives, such as the University of Texas Science Center at San Antonio and the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

Perot's philanthropy helped build art spaces such as the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Hall, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Dallas Arboretum and the AT&T Performing Arts Center, turning Dallas into a culture and entertainment hub.

However, the prevailing image of his legacy in and outside of Texas seems to circle around his two unsuccessful bids for presidents and his love for talking in front of charts.

A new play called Perot! American Patriot is opening this Friday at the Coppell Arts Center (505 Travis St.), based on a comprehensive biography of the same name, which highlights Perot's long-reaching influence and inspiration.

"I'm really up on current events and it is shocking to me how many people in his area don't know who Perot is," says actor and comedian Carl Merritt, who plays Perot. "Or if they know who he is they kind of thing of Dana Carvey or 'Oh yeah, didn't he run for president?' There was a lot of shit that he did."

Perot was known for building companies such as the tech giant EDS and for his philanthropy and the generosity he showed to his friends, employees and family —  who often fit in all three categories.

"Running for president is not the most significant thing he did because as we know anyone can do it," says Dave Lieber, the Dallas Morning News columnist who wrote the book and play based on Perot's life. "Every time I give a speech on this project, people come up to me and tell me stories, the most heartwarming, wonderful stories about their workplace experiences. You don't hear that kind of stuff much anymore."

Lieber got the idea to tackle Perot's life story after his previous biography and play on Amon Carter, which ran just before the start of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.

"I saw how Texans loved their heroes but they don't know the stories behind these Texas legends," Lieber says. "So I figured I could do it for Carter with Fort Worth and do one for Perot for Dallas."

Perot's drive started in his childhood in Texarkana during the challenging days of the Great Depression. Lieber says Perot sold seeds and Christmas cards when he was just six years old and started a newspaper route when he was 8. He pursued his political ambitions in the student body groups of his college and the U.S. Naval Academy and became the chairman of the committee that shaped the U.S. Naval Honor Code in 1949.

"He was already picked as a leader," Lieber says. "He realized nobody could do anything to him. He had so much money to protect himself from harm in a way that you and I can't."

He may have been a symbol of American capitalism who crossed into politics, but Perot is remembered as a man of the people among those who worked for him.

"Most employees don't have that kind of loyalty to their company and bosses," Lieber says. "He had all these tools. He ate in the cafeteria whenever he could and introduced himself to everybody. He would find out their name and job and family and went up and said, 'Hi, I'm Ross Perot' and they were touched. That's kind of missing in this corporate world."

One of his most notable career moments happened in 1978 when Iranian officials imprisoned two EDS employees with a $12.75 million bail sum. Perot organized a small, private military initiative without government help to rescue the men with as little force as was necessary. Perot himself went to Turkey to oversee plans to break the men out of prison until an Iranian EDS employee helped create a riot as a diversion that allowed the men and thousands of other inmates to escape, according to his foundation's website.  "It turns out that the play isn't about money and politics," Lieber says. "It's about family, love and values being passed down. The reason I ended up doing it is because I heard [H. Ross Perot Jr.'s] eulogy and thought it was so emotionally written and emotionally moving and I wanted to reverse-engineer it and see how Junior could give such an amazing speech about his dad."

Another part of the challenge of doing a play about Perot Sr. is his stage portrayal, since he's one of the most caricatured men of the '90s. Actor Merritt, who also performs comedy under the title of The Liberal Atheist Comic, says Perot's story will supersede anyone's personal beliefs and that finding an honest way to play the man was one of the biggest challenges of his performance career.

"Doing a caricature thing like Dana Carvey, that would be easy but the challenge here is to say here's the nature of this guy," Merritt says. "I'm going to use an East Texas accent but I'm going to try to do this in a way to use his cadence and I was careful to not make the cadence of his voice too high."

The play's director, Wheelice Pete Wilson, died less than a week before the opening date but had sent Merritt the script, even though Merritt had just moved to Ohio. The ambition Wilson and Lieber put into the play practically dripped off the page as he read it, he says.

"This does have the potential to surprise people," Merritt says. "There's a lot more tech in this play than is the standard for a lot of community theater for sure, but part of the bonus on this is largely because of the efforts of Pete Wilson and this brand new facility in Coppell. Little municipalities just don't do that. We've got what I think objectively is a great play and great tech to go with it."

Theatre Coppell's production of Perot! American Patriot by Dave Lieber opens at 8 p.m. Friday, Feb. 11 at the Coppell Arts Center and runs with eight additional performances until Sunday, Feb. 27. Tickets are available at CoppellArtsCenter.org.