At 84, Christopher Plummer is still a commanding and charismatic presence on stage, an actor of consummate skill. All of these attributes coalesce in A Word or Two, his solo show now lighting up the stage of the Ahmanson Theater in Los Angeles.
Plummer has been performing the show informally for various charities and arts organizations in recent years, but when the Stratford Festival of Canada beckoned, he brought in director Des McAnuff to further shape and polish the production. That resulted in an invitation from CTG to move the show from Stratford to southern California.
The purpose of A Word or Two, Plummer explains in a program note, "is simply to celebrate language which seems to be fast vanishing from our midst. It could be described as showing what an impact the written word can have on impressionable youth and is very much a personal stroll through literature, a literature that has long stirred my imagination and that, for one reason or another, it cannot let go."
Working on a minimalist set dominated by an upward-spiraling stack of books, Plummer traces his love of words back to his mother, who read to the family every night after dinner. Because home was Montreal, her selections alternated between French and English -- a policy Plummer follows in his show. Although most of his recitations are in English, he switches to French when it comes to, say, key moments from Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac. Only the original will do here, he intimates.
Plummer also talks about his own life in succinct but warm and irreverent fashion, describing how he went from timid impressionable childhood to rebellious teenagery to alcohol-saturated adulthood. He tosses some jokes and wisecracks into the mix: some new, some old. But always he returns to the great poetry and prose that he has learned and loved to this day. That includes several of Shakespeare's greatest speeches, passages from the Bible and from “Alice in Wonderland,” poems by A.A. Milne and Emily Dickenson, bitingly funny lines from the works of Canada's beloved humorist, Steven Leacock.
Modulating his voice for each excerpt, hitting high and low notes with equal ease, sometimes purring with love, other times thundering with anger, Plummer delivers a master-class in acting technique, drawing on everything he has learned during his sixty illustrious years as a theater, film and television star.
"If there is a theme to my show," Plummer confides, "let it be my eternal gratitude to a family who, from the moment I formed my first sentence, made me aware of the joy and magic of language which, after all, is our heritage to hold on to for dear life while we can."
