Northlight artistic director BJ Jones will stage the production May 21-June 29 at the respected Skokie, IL, resident theatre. Ivey and Jones are longtime pals and colleagues, fixtures in the Chicago theatre community. (Ivey is now a New Yorker.) (Expect Ivey to don an airy wig as Ann Landers. Both Landers and her columnist sister Abigail Van Buren — aka "Dear Abby" — were known for their swooping hairdos and no-nonsense advice.)

Ivey won Best Featured Actress Tony Awards for Steaming and Hurlyburly, and was nommed for Park Your Car in Harvard Yard. She was a plaintive Sally in the most recent Broadway production of Follies.

Ivey's been busy lately as a director, staging Secrets of a Soccer Mom Off-Broadway and shepherding the new musical Vanities toward a hoped-for fall launch on Broadway (via a tryout at Pasadena Playhouse this summer).

Before returning to her old stomping grounds in the Chicago area for Lady, Ivey will perform in Edward Albee's one-acts The American Dream and The Sandbox at Cherry Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village March 11-April 19 (Albee will direct).

To read Playbill.com's Feb. 26 Brief Encounter chat with Ivey, click here.

Tony-winner Randy Graff created the role of Chicago's Eppie Lederer (aka Ann Landers) in the 2005 world premiere of The Lady With All the Answers at The Old Globe in San Diego.

Rambo is the American playwright whose credits include God's Man in Texas and the revised libretto to Paint Your Wagon seen in fall 2007 at Pioneer Theatre in Salt Lake City, UT.

For more information about Northlight Theatre, visit www.northlight.org.