Christopher Plummer is in town for just 16 performances
in this emotionally potent one-man play that the New York Times called “a passionate love letter to language…”
Plummer grew up in Montreal reading Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, George Bernard
Shaw, Rudyard Kipling, A.A. Milne, Lewis Carroll, Lord Byron, Dylan Thomas,
W.H. Auden, Stephen Leacock, etc. and was “hooked
on the intoxication of words.” Here is a celebration of the poetry and
literature that has meant the most to him, stitched
together with ruminations that range from mothers to strippers, jazz to
cabaret, religion to death.
Plummer begins in his boyhood, spying Lewis Carroll's
"aged man, a sitting on a gate"
only to find himself at 82 becoming that fellow, as old age arrives more
quickly than you think! So what to do? He quotes Oscar Wilde: "No man is rich enough to buy back his own
past!" He talks of Dylan Thomas, whom he once hung out with in New
York. What about Love? Religion? With these usual solutions to our existential
angst banished from the stage, Plummer's reassures us that, for him, "the power of the writer's words make death
and decay bearable."
The show is directed by Des McAnuff, although written and arranged by
Plummer who is surrounded onstage by a tower of
books angling up, over and behind him, as eloquent witness to his passion.
At the Ahmanson Theatre, Los Angeles Music Center, 135 N
Grand Ave, Jan 19 through Feb 9. Tickets at the CTG box office or www.CenterTheatreGroup.org or
call (213) 972-4400.
Reviewed in the January issue of NOT BORN YESTERDAY
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