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NYT March 14, 1997 1st NY preview

NYT Mar 28, 1997

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NY Times June 2, 1997

from Stars in Our Eyes: Luminaries of Stage and Screen at Home in Westport and Weston

June 1, 1997, NY Times

The play ISBN 1568654391

tour poster

From John Willis Theatre World Vol. 53 1996 - 1997 including photos from the annual Theatre World Awards.

At this jewel of a theater - the Music Box, built by Irving Berlin and partners in 1921 - generations of actors flourish. Here, actor Christopher Plummer, starring in Barrymore (for which he recently won a Tony), appears in the same theater as did his daughter, Amanda, doing her star turn in the 1982 Tony Award-winning play Agnes of God. Likewise, John "Jack" Barrymore and senior siblings Ethel and Lionel were Broadway's royal family of the stage from the 1920s and 1940s. And Jack's late daughter Diana carried on the acting tradition, as currently does granddaughter and Generation Xer Drew Barrymore.

"I'm still decorating it," says Plummer of his spacious if slightly dowdy dressing-room suite. "I'm getting all my paintings and posters out of the basements to cover the cracks in the walls. It needs it. It's an old theater." In the meantime, the walls are well populated by a gallery of cards from well-wishers. "These are from first night at Stratford, where the play was born," the native Canadian explains, referring to the popular Ontario theater festival. "I bring them on the road and put them up everywhere I go. I consider it good luck. I want to carry it with me."

Talk of the cards reminds him: "I opened in Beckett at the Globe around Christmas on year [1961]. I kept the cards up forever. Then [Sir Laurence] Olivier came back in March and saw all these Christmas cards. He said, 'Dear boy, may I remind you that St. David's Day [the March 1 holiday celebrated in Wales] has passed?'" But to Plummer, good luck had no expiration date.

Asked about his health regime while working on the stage, the handsome, trim, New York Theater Hall of Famer laughs. "I don't exercise. I'd like to be able to tell you I feast on truffles, caviar, and foie gras. I do love my food and wine. And I used to do it in my 30s when I could get away with it. But now that I'm 103, I eat sparingly. I eat baby-food food like porridge, fish cakes and stewed peaches. It's light enough that it doesn't stick. Fortunately, I can belch in character as Barrymore if need be. But I'd rather not," says the 67-year-old Plummer, displaying the same bad-boy charm that Barrymore possessed.

The two-man play, a fact-based fiction by William Luce, is set in 1942. The Great Profile, as the late matinee idol was oft known, is purportedly mounting a comeback in a production of Richard III, the role that made him famous 22 years earlier. However, instead of rehearsing with his offstage prompter (played from the wings by Michael Mastro), Barrymore takes us on an excursion through his life of excess: too much liquor, too many siblings, too many wives. "There must have been pain underneath, but all that rubbish about him being a tragic figure isn't true," says Plummer defiantly. "He was creating another character, his last great role, a great, self-mocking buffoon. I think he enjoyed it thoroughly."

Conversation about the CDs Plummer listens to backstage touches on his vast talent for music - he has created, performed and recorded classical pieces with the likes of the London Symphony Orchestra - something he practically dismisses. "For an instant, I thought I'd make a career of music. I actually went to high school with Oscar Peterson, though he went much farther than I. We used to jam at recess on the school's piano's. Now I play for fun." His 1974 Tony award for the lead role in the musical Cyrano attests to his impressive singing abilities as well. But then, anyone who remembers him as Captain Von Trapp in the movie The Sound of Music knows he can sing. In fact, this past June, he donned lederhosen and serenaded his tearful ex-leading lady, Julie Andrews, with "Edelweiss" as she celebrated her departure from the musical Victor/Victoria.

Plummer also has more than 60 other films - from The Man Who Would Be King to Star Trek VI - to his credit. But perhaps the zenith of his career was receiving the 1990 William Shakespeare Award at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, in recognition of his portrayals of such classic figures as Marc Antony, Henry V, Hamlet, Benedick, Iago, Mercutio and, like Barrymore himself, Richard III. "I've always done stage," says Plummer, a Juilliard honorary Doctor of Fine Arts. "I always will." The he admits, "I didn't study - ever. I was doing it. The audience was my teacher." - Diane Lander.
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Barrymore, the Music Box Theater, 239 West 45th St., New York. Tickets: 212-239-6200.

From New York Times, Sunday March 23, 1997 "Arts and Leisure Guide" listing, pg. H44 From New York Times Oct. 7, 2001, "Christopher Plummer Drops By Westport"

March 26, 1997

There are, on the one hand, the jokes, which are artfully told, epigrammatic and often lewd. On the other hand (and it's the ruling hand), there are the pauses between and within the jokes, in which the teller's eyes go glassy with a soul-searing fear. He has seen something unspeakable, and words like failure, ruin and even death don't begin to describe it.

It's unlikely that you'll meet more charming or more disturbing company this season that that of John Barrymore, the long-dead, famously self-destructive actor who has returned for an evening's flirtation with the furies of the Music Box Theatre.

William Luce's work is simply called "Barrymore," and it isn't in itself too much of a play. But be grateful to Mr. Luce, a specialist in biographical dramas (including "The Belle of Amherst"); he has provided Christopher Plummer with the chance to create a portrait of riveting complexity and paradox that defies easy psychology. Finding the illuminating spark of divinity in the junk heap of the aging Barrymore, Mr. Plummer spectacularly confirms his reputation as the finest classical actor in North America.

The standup breakdown has become a reigning form in the theatre of dead celebrities in recent years. Whether the focus is Truman Capote or Maria Callas, it allows its subjects to spin off witty anecdotes about glamorous lives while occasionally erupting into tormented cries showing the crippled soul beneath the tinsel. It's like being seated next to a chatty trophy star at a dinner party with conveniently reduced potential for embarrassment.

"Barrymore" is definitely part of this somewhat shameless tradition. And the actor in his waning years, a pathological specimen of self-parody, would seem to be an especially shameless subject. But under the assured, appropriately theatrical direction of Gene Saks, Mr. Plummer emerges as far more than the "clown prince," as Barrymore here describes himself with sour disgust, of America's royal family of actors.

In Barrymore, Mr. Luce imagines that the actor, one month before his death, has taken over a Broadway theatre for an evening to run lines from "Richard III," in anticipation of possibly recreating the role that provided him with his first Shakespearean triumph some 20 years earlier. Though aided by Frank (Michael Mastro), an unseen prompter with a Yonkers accent, the alcohol-pickled Barrymore can't remember much of the crookback's soliloquies.

Instead, he finds his mind roving randomly through memories of his anxious, unorthodox childhood, his roller-coaster love life (including four marriages he describes as "bus accidents") and his roller-coaster career, which went from the zenith of his 1922 "Hamlet" to the nadir of self-impersonation in Hollywood B movies.

Contrived? You bet. Mr. Luce's script has a lurching quality that isn't just a matter of its subject's alcoholic disjunctiveness. And even for a work about a man whose life was a long-running performance, the play is overstuffed with one-liners ("Things are beginning to click for me: my arms, my knees"), impersonations (of everyone from W.C. Fields to John's regal siblings, Ethel and Lionel, marvelously rendered) and the sort of stories that show up in books with titles like "Amusing Theatrical Anecdotes."

Yet Mr. Plummer and Mr. Saks have turned this fragmented material into something as fluid, stinging and warming as the cocktail (a Manhattan?) Barrymore mixes for himself onstage. And the evening (starting with the frayed lushness in autumnal colors of Santo Loquasto's backstage set) takes on an affecting shimmer of twilight, even as Mr. Plummer's Barrymore delights you with his own delight in his silly, ribald jokes (most of which are unprintable here).

It may be the production's chief accomplishment that it can have it both ways so successfully: it's both fiendishly entertaining and blisteringly sad. Watching this Barrymore, whether he's reciting from "Hamlet" (in a stagey period style that is nonetheless riveting) or singing "Yes Sir! That's My Baby" while costumed as Richard III, is like watching a brilliant drunk at a party.

You know that you shouldn't be enjoying his antics so much: that what he's doing, pathetically, is postponing the inevitable hour when the party's over and he has to go to bed with his demons. And for the drunk in this instance, to sleep means perchance to die. When Barrymore says that "people are convinced that I carry around my own ashes," it's more than just gallows humor.

Unlike the British actor Nicol Williamson, who did his own, oddly lumpy take on Barrymore last season, Mr. Plummer bears a stunning resemblance here to the man he's playing. The performance is so skilled both as an interpretation and impersonation (Mr. Plummer's glittering, restless eyes directly evoke the Barrymore of the movies) that it does something remarkable: it puts Barrymore's very style of acting, at least as we know it from film, in a richly personal and illuminating context.

This is achieved without a whiff of over-simplification on Mr. Plummer's part. Whether making a master vaudevillian's entrance, singing "I've Got a Gal in Kalamazoo," or turning into a little boy scared of the dark, this actor never forgets the unsure child beneath the ham not the self-dramatizing ham in the frightened child.

Mr. Plummer's Barrymore can find the balletic elegance in a drunken stagger, the poetry in a blue joke and the churning guts in rarefied verse. And as he walks toward his own death, it's with the jaunty panache of a boulevardier off to meet his new mistress.
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Barrymore
By William Luce, with Michael Mastro; directed by Gene Saks; sets and costumes by Santo Loquasto; Lighting by Natasha Katz. Presented by Livent (U.S. Inc.) At the Music Box, 239 West 45th Street, Manhattan
WITH: Christopher Plummer (John Barrymore) and Michael Mastro (Frank)

STRATFORD, Ontario -- WITH THE CONFIDENCE of the superb actor he has become, and in the trim of an athlete, Christopher Plummer is here in a new play, giving an achingly funny, memorably strong and debonair performance that with any luck will astonish Broadway later this season.

It is 40 years since Mr. Plummer first played ''Henry V'' with the Stratford Festival company, to which he has returned a number of times since, but this engagement is turning out to be especially productive. His vehicle: ''Barrymore,'' William Luce's two-character piece about the last days of John Barrymore (1882-1942), the theater's legendary prodigal son, scion of America's most famous acting family, younger brother of Ethel and Lionel and grandfather to Drew.

Unlike Nicol Williamson, who was Barrymore in the one-man play ''Jack'' last season in New York, Mr. Plummer demonstrates why actors are drawn to a character whose troubled life has become a footnote to theater history and who is mostly remembered today for just a handful of movies.

''Jack'' was more a presentation of Mr. Williamson than a revelation of Jack. ''Barrymore,'' directed by Gene Saks, is more complex, being about a man who began his acting career because it was the family business and then couldn't resign. Once committed to that career, he pursued it with the surreptitious determination of Prince Hal. He achieved his years of glory but, instead of growing into Henry V, he wound up as Falstaff in Hollywood, rejected, ridiculed and terminally ill, if still gallant.

In this new play, Mr. Luce imagines that in the spring of 1942, one month before his death, Barrymore returns to New York determined to revive his 1920 Broadway triumph in ''Richard III,'' his first major Shakespearean role and the performance that put him in the front rank of American classical actors. To this purpose he has hired a theater and a trusted prompter named Frank (Michael Mastro), who remains offstage throughout, to help him run through his ''Richard'' lines before he makes his pitch to any producers.

In keeping with the flamboyance of the character, Mr. Plummer's entrance in ''Barrymore'' is not easily forgotten: A single spot shines down to create a circle of light at stage-center, but there is no one in it. Pause. Other lights come up to reveal a stage empty except for an umbrella stand that also holds a couple of swords, a laundry hamper and a draped object that later turns out to be Richard's throne. There is another pause, followed by the sounds of a small commotion offstage, followed by a strong, imperious voice that seems familiar even if you can't place it.

Enter a beatific Barrymore singing ''I've Got a Gal in Kalamazoo'' (at that time a hit recording by Glenn Miller and the Modernaires). Before putting down his black overnight bag with his liquor supply, he sweeps grandly around the stage, emphasizing the ''zoo-zoo-zoos'' at the end of each ''Kalamazoo'' and tripping a bit of the light fantastic. He's in dangerously high spirits.

It could be a sendup of the kind of big-star entrances that Ethel used to make. With his Roman profile more or less intact, this Barrymore is still a most impressive figure of a man in his expensive, beautifully tailored suit, carrying himself like a boulevardier. He has the look of someone who has been massaged for days, shaved an hour ago by the best barber in town, and drenched in an after-shave lotion that temporarily masks the whisky and brandy fumes.

You wouldn't initially guess that he is in the last stages of cirrhosis of the liver and that his mind has become a sieve: he can't remember lines. In Hollywood, where he makes his living on the Rudy Vallee radio show, parodying himself as an over-the-hill ham actor, he can read from a script. When he makes a movie, his lines must be written on blackboards.

Now, back on Broadway, he is determined to tame his demons (just a nip now and again) and discipline his wayward mind. But as lines refuse to come to him, he gets sidetracked. Everything he says or does calls up the past. As the faithful Frank tries to maintain order, Barrymore slips into memories. These in turn prompt the recitation of obscene limericks, the telling of anecdotes that are alternately hilarious and sadder than he can admit, and the delivery of one-liners, the sort of humor in which he deals on radio.

''Barrymore'' reveals a man who, born and bred in the 19th century, has never quite adjusted to the new century with which he's identified. His concept of masculinity makes him suspicious of his own pretty-boy looks, though he trades on them. His relations with women have been more than a little affected by his enthusiastic seduction, at age 11, by his stepmother, and by his father's response when he caught the lovers: a giant horselaugh.

Throughout his life he has either fawned over or mistreated the women he can't do without. He describes his four marriages as ''bus accidents.'' ''My divorces cost me more than my marriages,'' he brays at one point, ''but, goddamn it, they're worth it!'' He's a man of genuine sensitivity and wit. There are stories of a loving grandmother, of the supportive brother and sister who have remained close throughout.

He's also a carouser, most comfortable in the company of that gifted, skeptical, hard-drinking fraternity of former newspapermen who have been boon companions in New York and Hollywood. They heard the chimes at midnight. Among them: Gene Fowler, the screenwriter whose biography, ''Goodnight, Sweet Prince'' is a treasure trove of priceless Barrymore anecdotes.

The program for ''Barrymore'' gives Fowler's son Will ''grateful acknowledgment'' for ''supplying basic material'' for the play. Indeed, like some of the most talented members of the Algonquin Round Table, Barrymore is remembered less for what he accomplished than for his high jinks and the anecdotes that are told about him today.

Mr. Luce, who wrote ''The Belle of Amherst,'' in which Julie Harris won a Tony Award, could still give ''Barrymore'' a cleaner, stronger dramatic arc. There are occasional cheap lines that sound out of place. What is, in effect, a one-man show can be allowed to ramble only if the material is consistently invigorating and builds momentum, even if that momentum carries us back to the beginning.

As it stands now, ''Barrymore'' depends more than it should on Mr. Plummer's virtuosity, but since that virtuosity is so dazzling, the reservations may be academic. Mr. Plummer somehow manages to look and sound like Barrymore without losing his own identity or doing tricky things with his voice. He is as self-assured slipping suddenly into a passage from ''Hamlet'' as he is when, dressed in full Richard gear, he climbs awkwardly upon the throne and his mind goes blank. Instead of Shakespeare's lines, he speaks a self-mocking ''Wynken, Blynken and Nod.'' I will only mention his detour into ''Antony and Cleopatra,'' his story about the cremation of a friend whose body, instead of burning, blew up, and his rendition of ''When the Midnight Choo-Choo Leaves for Alabam'.''

''Barrymore'' is not your usual Stratford Festival attraction. It is being presented in arrangement with Garth H. Drabinsky's Livent, the Toronto-based production company responsible for the current revival of ''Show Boat'' in New York. After ''Barrymore'' closes on Oct. 20 at the Avon Theater here, the plan is for a tour in the States with a New York opening tentatively set for March or April.

SAN FRANCISCO - Christopher Plummer admits to having been a little uneasy when John Barrymore's widow came to see his portrayal of her late husband in William Luce's play "Barrymore." "I laid it on with a trowel in the beginning and then relaxed," Plummer says of his performance that evening.

But he needn't have worried. Elaine Barrymore came back a second time, shared with Plummer some private love letters from her husband "and said she closed her eyes and heard him. That was the nicest thing anyone could possibly say."

She was neither the first nor last to say nice things about Plummer's Broadway performance, a tour de force that won him a 1997 Tony Award. Now touring the country in a production of "Barrymore" that opens at the Ahmanson Theatre on Wednesday, Plummer could not have received better notices if he'd written them himself. Reviewing "Barrymore" in New York magazine, hard-to-please critic John Simon referred to Canadian-born Plummer as "the greatest living actor in the English language." The Times' Laurie Winer called him "a great actor playing a great actor--the accumulated richness of theatrical history on stage is truly breathtaking."

Even offstage, the casually dressed, 68-year-old actor commands the lobby of a Nob Hill hotel much as he commands the Herbst Theatre stage here. Heads turn, and service people appear instantly. The voice that, critic Simon says, "in its chamois mode, can polish mirrors," sounds just as mellifluous simply ordering coffee.

"I've always had a dislike of playing actors, but Barrymore was such a rich character that he transcends being an actor," Plummer says. "He did hit the heights, and his last great role was himself. He never sustained that level of discipline or strength and technique to go on playing other parts. So he created his own Falstaff at the end of his life--a very rich and riddled character it was, too."

Barrymore was already a matinee idol when he performed both "Richard III" and "Hamlet" onstage, succeeding grandly in both. But victimized by his drinking and high life offstage, he was, at the end of his life, back in Hollywood reading lines off cue cards and parodying himself on Rudy Vallee's radio show and in films like 1940's "The Great Profile."

Given its inherent drama, Barrymore's life has been chronicled again and again in books and onstage, most recently in Nicol Williamson's solo vehicle "Jack: A Night on the Town With John Barrymore." All the ingredients for a play are there, remarks playwright Luce: John Barrymore "was vainglorious and eloquent, ridiculous and terribly intelligent."

Luce's device is to imagine Barrymore a month before his 1942 death, renting a theater to try to recapture the glory of his "Richard III." He has hired a prompter--the show's unseen second actor, played here by John Plumpis--to help him with lines he can't remember and deal with demons he remembers only too well. He's armed with a medicine bag full of booze and plenty of good stories.

This Barrymore drifts in and out of self-awareness and self-deception, travesty and despair. He puts himself down as "the clown prince" of American theater's royal family; for him, the family business is "a scavenger profession." His four wives were "bus accidents." His hands shake, his memory's gone and his health is shot.

It's a grueling performance. Onstage the entire time, Plummer sings, prances, jokes, rages, agonizes, recites Shakespeare, nibbles on a banana to cure whiskey breath. He impersonates W.C. Fields, Barrymore's brother Lionel and sister Ethel, gossip columnist Louella Parsons, even a French-speaking parrot.

New York producer Robert Whitehead, who saw an early draft of Luce's play, immediately sent it on to friend Plummer. "Chris has enough understanding of the disillusions of life and enough remembrance of the problems of boozing as well as the pleasures," says Whitehead, who has known Plummer for more than 40 years. "He has a poetic quality deep in his heart and soul, and he has just enough tough-mindedness and nostalgia to fill the character of John Barrymore."

Luce couldn't have been happier, he says. "I didn't write it for him consciously, but he was there in the back of my mind as the quintessential choice. . . . And Christopher is an actor far better trained and more gifted than even Barrymore, which enables him to plumb all the colors of Jack Barrymore."

Luce visited Plummer and his wife of 28 years, Elaine Taylor, at their country home in Connecticut. The two men watched Barrymore films on video, walked in the woods and brainstormed, says Luce, who sounds genuinely appreciative of Plummer's contributions.

Plummer acknowledges that he suggested words, phrases, even entire scenes. The actor added poetry fragments from Browning and Byron, as well as snippets from Shakespeare he has performed again and again in his career. Plummer introduced the idea of beginning the play with some lines from "Antony and Cleopatra," for instance, saying that although Barrymore never played him, "Jack would have been the perfect Antony--glamorous, slightly seedy, past his prime, a great warrior. A fading star. He was born to play it, particularly at the age that we do him in the play."

He also persuaded Luce to rearrange his material so that it would be more theatrical. "I have now, God knows, been in the theater almost 50 years," Plummer says. "I should know where the climaxes and the codas should come."

Great-grandson of Canadian Prime Minister John Abbott, Plummer says he "got a smell for the stage very early on." He doesn't want to talk much about his early years, given that he's now finishing up a book about his life, but he vividly tells of childhood visits in Montreal to great theater, ballet, opera and symphonies. "I even saw Rachmaninoff play the piano when I was 12."

Plummer helped with the lighting on a school play at 16, and by 18 was performing as a radio actor in both French and English. He trained with classical repertory companies in Montreal, Ottawa and Bermuda before heading off to New York with letters of introduction to producer Whitehead, who recalls that even in his early 20s, Plummer "already had a force."

He made his Broadway debut in "The Starcross Story" in 1954, performing with both Eva le Gallienne and Mary Astor. Elia Kazan directed him in Archibald MacLeish's "J.B.," and his distinguished classical work in New York, London and Stratford, Canada, has swept in everything from "Henry V" to "Medea" and "Beckett." Writing in the New York Times in 1982, Walter Kerr called Plummer's Iago (to James Earl Jones' Othello) "quite possibly the best single Shakespearean performance to have originated on this continent in our time."

While his only other Tony Award came for his performance in the 1973 musical "Cyrano," Plummer has rarely been offstage for long. In recent years, he has also played on Broadway opposite Glenda Jackson in "Macbeth" and with Jason Robards in a revival of Harold Pinter's "No Man's Land."

Unlike many other actors of his generation, he has been able to glide back and forth readily from the stage to film, television and recording roles. Plummer has made more than 60 films since his 1958 debut in Sidney Lumet's "Stage Struck," and picked up Emmys for both performance (in Arthur Hailey's "The Moneychangers") and voice-over (the animated "Madeline" children's TV series).

There have been countless heroes and villains on both the small and large screen, some of them forgettable but many monumental. While he is surely best-known for his Baron von Trapp in "The Sound of Music"--a role and film he has often disparaged in interviews--he has also appeared in everything from Peter Shaffer's "The Royal Hunt of the Sun" to Terry Gilliam's "12 Monkeys."

"Chris is a character actor as well as a leading man," says "Barrymore" director Gene Saks. "He can play a great classic, and he can play vaudeville. There's his intelligence, his great humor and all his natural attributes--a wonderful, handsome face, a great voice and an ability to move with grace, no matter what character he plays. His range is vast, and it's something you rarely see."

Plummer adds that he likes the variety of working in so many media. "How boring it would be to be just one thing--just a movie actor, or just a stage actor--when you can just keep going from one to the other. I think one also helps the other. I'll go on doing it until I drop." Even as he tours America in "Barrymore," Plummer is simultaneously working on a new Michael Mann film. The film, yet untitled, is about tobacco whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand and "60 Minutes" segment producer Lowell Bergman's fight to get Wigand's testimony on the air.

When Plummer glances up from his coffee to say that he's playing Mike Wallace in the film, he somehow looks for that minute exactly like the television icon. But Plummer doesn't mimic Wallace any more than he does Barrymore.

It's an approach director Mann is looking for: "If you try to mimic in physical appearance Mike Wallace, who is seen by 30 million Americans every Sunday night, that's not a very intelligent way to go about it. Instead, there's some quintessence to the personality you're trying to regenerate."

Wallace is tricky to do, adds Mann, who scheduled Plummer's shoots around the "Barrymore" tour. The actor, he says, "is absolutely a revelation. There's an attractiveness and energy to his portrayal that's wonderful. He's acidic, witty and charismatic as hell as Mike Wallace."

Just as with Barrymore, Plummer says, the important thing is to suggest someone. "As long as the audience sees in flashes the person, that's fine. If it was an imitation, it would be so artificial and so cardboard cutout."

It helps, of course, that in addition to their shared ability to deliver fabled Shakespearean performances, Barrymore and Plummer look astonishingly alike. In smaller ways, too, they have much in common: Barrymore was married four times, Plummer three. (Plummer's first wife, actress Tammy Grimes, is the mother of his daughter, actress Amanda Plummer.) Barrymore wanted to be an artist, not an actor, while Plummer thought briefly of a career as a pianist but didn't pursue it, he says, "because it was too much like work."

While Plummer never met Barrymore, an early friendship with Barrymore's daughter Diana "helped a great deal to paint a picture of Jack--certainly, that was a part of my subconscious." But he already knew a great deal about Barrymore from his movies, he adds. "I'd known them all when I was a kid. They were so much a part of me, and he was so much a part of me because I'd read all the books on him when I was 14. They'd just come out, I was interested in acting, and here was 'Good Night, Sweet Prince,' by Gene Fowler, full of racy stories.

"Jack was a glamorous man with an enormous talent and an enormous sense of the macabre and fun," Plummer continues. "I think that spurred me on to become an actor--if I could be like him and also get all my drinking done at the same time. He seemed to be able to do everything and still enjoy his drink, which finally caught up with him, of course."

Plummer calls the play "a sort of love letter to an actor," and in Plummer's hands, Barrymore in decline seems more charming and childlike than pathetic. While the unseen prompter in the play rages at Barrymore's failure to take "Richard the turd" seriously, Plummer is more sympathetic.

Plummer tells of his "fascination for the man, my affection for him even though I didn't know him, my respect, and my total delight and amusement by his antics. . . . He lived dangerously and too near the sun to let anything worry him. And he took full responsibility for his devilry and his actions--he didn't blame his analyst or his mother.

"I don't think that Hollywood, particularly the film industry today, would have the time, the patience, the money or the humor to deal with Jack Barrymore. Because his great stage reputation had preceded him, he got away with murder. . . . But I would love to have known him because I imagine he was absolutely great company. Elaine Barrymore said she thought the two of us would have gotten on great." *

"Barrymore," Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave. Opens Wednesday. Regular schedule: Tuesdays to Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Thursdays, Saturdays, Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends Sept. 27. $ 15-$ 52.50. (213) 628-2772.

GRAPHIC: PHOTO: (No Caption / Christopher Plummer) PHOTOGRAPHER: ROBERT DURELL / Los Angeles Times

LA Times Sept 24, 1998 LA Times Sept 18, 1998

John Barrymore's stage and screen performances were usually more memorable than the vehicles in which he appeared.

The same can be said for Christopher Plummer in "Barrymore," which opened Wednesday at the Ahmanson Theatre. His Tony-winning portrayal is amusing and evocative, but William Luce's play is paper-thin and utterly predictable.

It's almost a solo. Plummer is the only person we see. However, we hear another actor, John Plumpis, calling out from the wings.

Plummer plays Barrymore in late April, 1942, one month before his alcohol-induced death. He has rented a theater for a one-night return to "Richard III," which was the first of his two Shakespearean triumphs, 22 years earlier. We're supposedly watching a rehearsal, to use the noun loosely. It consists primarily of personal reminiscences, spoken directly to the audience, with only sporadic intrusions of Shakespeare. Offstage, a young man named Frank (Plumpis) serves as the star's prompter and stage manager.

For some unexplained reason--perhaps to appeal to Broadway sensibilities--Luce set the play in New York, on an old-fashioned stage designed by Santo Loquasto. The real Barrymore spent almost all of his final two years in Los Angeles, where he was a self-deprecating regular on Rudy Vallee's radio show.

According to one of his biographers, Michael Morrison, the great star delivered excerpts from "Richard III" at the end of one of the generally lighthearted Vallee broadcasts. That strange juxtaposition of the crooner and the thespian sounds like a more dramatically charged situation than the one invented by Luce. So, for that matter, does a reported 1941 overture by an inebriated Barrymore to Dame Judith Anderson about the possibility of playing opposite him in "Macbeth," perhaps at the Hollywood Bowl.

Neither of those situations would have worked as an almost-solo show, however, and apparently someone perceived a great need for another Barrymore monodrama, even though Nicol Williamson also played a Barrymore monodrama here and on Broadway a mere two years ago.

Plummer's performance almost justifies the redundancy. His Barrymore is one charming drunk.

Though he's eight years older than Barrymore was when he died, Plummer looks exactly the right age--in other words, just a few years and many drinks beyond the Barrymore who's familiar from early '30s movies. His voice is still powerfully resonant. He has the requisite great profile--though it looks just as formidable on his right side as it does on Barrymore's preferred left side. In one of Luce's wittier touches, Barrymore insists that his prompter move to the wings on the other side of the stage so that we can see Barrymore's favored side when he calls to the wings for a prompt.

In the first act, Plummer wears a bold pinstriped suit and a hat that emphasize Barrymore's rakish qualities. But after intermission, he emerges in a stereotypical Richard III outfit--complete with tights, hump and Prince Valiant wig--that makes up the evening's biggest sight gag, topped only when he then tries on an enormous but somewhat threadbare crown.

Under the direction of Gene Saks, Plummer guides us expertly through Barrymore's bawdy limericks, wisecracks, brief mimicking of other characters in his life and occasionally funny comic exchanges with the unseen Frank. He successfully blends Barrymore's frequent imbibing of liquid refreshment into the pacing of the evening, without the prolonged pauses that would probably afflict a truly tipsy actor in such circumstances. He turns a drunken stagger into incongruously light-footed movement.

Likewise, Plummer knows how to plumb the script's fill-in-the-blanks pathos. Not surprisingly, this Barrymore is raging against the dying of the light. Not surprisingly, Frank's disgusted threat to walk out on him shakes him up. Unfortunately, Frank doesn't make good on his threat, which might have led to a marginally deeper level of soul-searching.

It's a pleasure to hear Plummer recite scattered lines from Shakespeare. But it's a somewhat slender pleasure, given the slightness of the play and the expectations of much bigger shows in a hall with 1,600 seats. "Barrymore" stokes desires to see similar talent in a real play about the Barrymores ("The Royal Family," perhaps) or in a real play by one William Shakespeare.

* "Barrymore," Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends Sept. 27. $15-$52.50. (213) 628-2772. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.
Christopher Plummer: John Barrymore
John Plumpis: Frank
A Livent (U.S.) Inc. production. By William Luce. Directed by Gene Saks. Sets and costumes by Santo Loquasto. Lighting by Natasha Katz. Hair design by Michael Kriston. Production stage manager Robin Rumpf Corbett.

PHOTO: In "Barrymore," Christopher Plummer scales the heights as he plumbs the great actor's depths.; PHOTOGRAPHER: PERRY C. RIDDLE / Los Angeles Times

BOSTON -- THE FIRST THING the audience hears at ''Barrymore'' is Christopher Plummer delivering, in tones more measured and marinated than the clipped, springy inflections he generally brings to Shakespeare, one of Mark Antony's elegiac speeches from ''Antony and Cleopatra,'' the one whose key phrase is ''I have lost command.'' After which, the actor makes his entrance, rolling into view backward, pulling a bar-cart and singing with roguish enthusiasm ''I Got a Gal in Kalamazoo.'' Right at the top, here are the two sides of John Barrymore, tragedian and clown, not to mention the two sides of Mr. Plummer: classical actor and out-front entertainer.

Barrymore never played Antony, but Mr. Plummer thinks he should have, which is why the actor starts his one-man show with a homage to the great performance his subject never gave. Writing in The New York Times last year from Canada, Vincent Canby found Mr. Plummer's own performance in ''Barrymore'' ''achingly funny, memorably strong and debonair.'' The play, directed by Gene Saks, is now in previews at the Music Box Theater, where it opens on Tuesday, March 25.

Over afternoon tea at the Ritz Hotel in Boston, after a Sunday matinee on the pre-Broadway tour of ''Barrymore,'' Mr. Plummer recalled his own Antony, given at Stratford, Ontario, in 1967. Before doing it, he had consulted Laurence Olivier, who extended his sympathy. ''Poor fellow,'' said Olivier, who had once played Antony to the Cleopatra of Vivien Leigh, ''it's such a bad part; he's just a failed movie star.''

Mr. Plummer agrees with the description but not with the evaluation. ''Antony's a marvelous part,'' he said, ''a giant filled with pathos at the end of his life, a crumbling noble creature. And so was Barrymore. If he'd been in shape, he'd have been a great Antony.''

Mr. Plummer himself is in terrific shape. Age 67, he shows no sign of being at the end of anything. He is dapper even when casual and enjoying his tea. He is still a matinee idol, but with oratorical weight and a gleam of self-mockery.

The Barrymore in William Luce's play, glimpsed shortly before his alcoholic death in 1942, is making a doomed if spirited attempt to get through a solo rehearsal of ''Richard III,'' once his greatest role. When Mr. Plummer was growing up -- in Canada in the 1930's and 40's -- Barrymore was ''the image of the very naughty rebel we were all attracted to at that time,'' he said, ''the last great actor with mystique. The fact that he could do wonderful things onstage, then dissipate all night -- I think he inspired a lot of us guys, all the good two-fisted drinkers of our time.''

The two-fisted drinkers -- a favorite phrase of Mr. Plummer's and an image he obviously enjoys cultivating -- seen as a group seem to have spanned oceans and generations; names mentioned include Richard Burton, Peter O'Toole, Trevor Howard, Albert Finney and Jason Robards. Mr. Plummer may be the least famous, but he is also, and certainly if playing the classics is a gauge, the greatest survivor. He may have flirted with the self-destructive Barrymore image, but he never quite embraced it. (He puts some of this down to liking food; he got too hungry to be a really serious drinker.)

Unlike the British actors who were hailed for bringing a revolutionary proletarian approach to the classics, Mr. Plummer, with his fire and irony, was a new traditionalist: Canada's and, ultimately North America's, own Olivier. The comparison has haunted him throughout his career, but he has gone beyond it; having aged into a character actor, he is more natural, less mannered than Olivier ever was. On Broadway, his Iago, opposite James Earl Jones's Othello in 1982, and his duet with Mr. Robards in Harold Pinter's ''No Man's Land'' in 1994 were major events.

So he is an anomalous figure, difficult to place. That is literally true. A Canadian citizen and scion of a distinguished Canadian family (his great-grandfather was Prime Minister), he devotes talent and energy to raising funds for Canadian theaters but lives in the United States. He has had, and relished, a reputation as a womanizer, and his first two marriages were short-lived, but his third, to Elaine Taylor, a former British actress, seems to have given him stability; they celebrated their silver wedding anniversary two years ago.

MICHAEL LANGHAM, the British-born director who first brought Mr. Plummer to Stratford, says, ''Chris had a kind of wildness, a passionate desire to live like a 30's film star. You should see his house in Connecticut.'' On the other hand, it is in Connecticut, not Hollywood, and despite having made by his own estimate 50 or 60 movies, Mr. Plummer is not a true film star.

His movie roles are surprisingly hard to remember. One recalls that he threw imperial fits in ''The Fall of the Roman Empire,'' was a delicious Restoration fop in ''Lock Up Your Daughters'' and made an extravagant Inca monarch in ''The Royal Hunt of the Sun.'' Pauline Kael, reviewing the latter, said presciently that not even John Barrymore would have given so outrageous a performance: ''He wouldn't have dared.'' In fact, Mr. Plummer's most notable picture -- a suggestion he now accepts with resignation -- has to be ''The Sound of Music.'' He got second billing to Julie Andrews, but Richard Monette, the current director of the Stratford Festival, reckons that it is what made him famous. ''People see it when they're young; he's living forever,'' Mr. Monette said.

Another paradox: for much of the 1960's, this major stage actor was based in London, but a British theatergoer might not have noticed. He spent a fruitful year with the Royal Shakespeare Company, staking his own claim to Richard III and winning an award as King Henry in ''Becket,'' but basically he was making films. The European residence meant that he saw little of his daughter, the actress Amanda Plummer, while she was growing up. Now he thinks she is ''quite amazing -- she's always working.''

''It's why I never hear from her,'' he added. ''She wants to come back to the theater and she should.''

His marriage to Amanda's mother, Tammy Grimes, lasted ''five or six years.''

''She was more successful than I was at the time,'' he recalled, ''raking in the loot in musicals and nightclubs. I was doing good classical stuff at Stratford. It wasn't going to work out.''

Mr. Langham, the director, said that ''Tammy was an adorable person at that time.''

''She looked as if she had just woken up and found the world surprisingly wonderful,'' he continued. ''But that marriage was so wild. He really needed someone to be a mother and a guardian to him. He feels he hasn't been a good father because he didn't have one himself.''

Mr. Plummer's parents divorced when he was very young. He had been born in Toronto in 1929: ''Not only was it the time of the crash but the remnants of Prohibition were in the air. I sniffed it at once, at the age of 1, and said, 'This city is not for me.' '' (It's a good line, and he admits to using it often.) Removed to the more urbane environment of Montreal, he had ''a very Edwardian, very proper and fun'' bringing-up. His family were ''the distinguished poor -- not poverty-stricken, I assure you.'' His ''wonderfully wise'' mother took him to ''everything -- opera, ballet, theater, symphonic music,'' and he had an early ambition to be a concert pianist; he is still very musical and sings well on stage when he has to. (He won a Tony Award in 1974 for a musical Cyrano on Broadway, but his singing in ''The Sound of Music'' -- all those choruses of ''Edelweiss'' -- was dubbed.)

MONTREAL, HE remembers, ''was rich in entertainment of all sorts.''

''It was even richer in nightclub life, as I discovered when I was 15 and could safely run away from home,'' he said. ''I would sit at the bar and nurse a beer and watch all the French performers -- Chevalier, Piaf. I saw them all when they were still fairly young. And Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland. Cabaret got me interested in acting more than theater did; I couldn't believe all these wonderful people could hold an audience of drunks.''

Like many Canadians, he left home to get famous. He was on Broadway, acting opposite Julie Harris in ''The Lark'' in 1956, when Mr. Langham snapped him up for Stratford. He had auditioned for the festival at its commencement in 1953, but its founder and director, Tyrone Guthrie, turned him down. ''He had thought me a bit of a playboy,'' said Mr. Plummer, ''and he was absolutely right.''

Mr. Langham, Guthrie's protege and successor, invited him to play Henry V. ''I was the first Canuck to lead the company,'' Mr. Plummer said. Previously, it had been headed by visiting luminaries like Alec Guinness and James Mason. The production was a critical and popular success. ''It zapped my career,'' he said. ''From that time on, my name was above the title.''

In the next few years he consolidated his position as Stratford's -- and by extension North America's -- top Shakespearean actor. Mr. Langham says he had ''the chemistry of a romantic classical actor -- a lot of sex, great charm, a natural comedic gift.''

Mr. Plummer was back at Stratford in 1996, starting off the ''Barrymore'' tour, but the last Shakespeare he played there was the 1967 Antony, and even then he was more the visiting star than the company leading man. He says now that at 37 he wasn't ripe for the part (''I was a young ruin''), though Zoe Caldwell, who was his Cleopatra, says he was ''extraordinary.'' Mr. Monette, then a young actor playing Antony's page Eros, said: ''Acting with him was a real lesson; he varied things from night to night, which wasn't the custom at Stratford in those days. He was an idol. I wanted to act like Chris Plummer.''

As head of the festival, Mr. Monette observes that in private, ''Chris can be extremely gracious; as an actor -- he gets what he wants.'' This included having the Avon Theater orchestra pit at Stratford covered over for the run of ''Barrymore.'' ''He made his demand,'' Mr. Monette said. ''He made it forcefully. We had to do it. Mind you, he was right.''

Mr. Plummer says now that he ''wouldn't mind doing Antony again.'' He would like a black Cleopatra (''Whoopi Goldberg wants to do it; she's always talking about it'') so that the Romans and Egyptians are two distinct societies onstage. He would also like to do Hamlet again (''They say I'm too old, which is ridiculous; Edwin Booth managed to do it with long gray flowing hair when he was as old as I am; the audience didn't seem to mind''); or Othello, which he has never done and for which he would be ideal (''but if I tried it in this country I'd be lynched'') or -- now he's talking -- Falstaff.

Mr. Monette would undoubtedly take him up on any of these but Mr. Plummer seems reluctant: ''I think it's more adventurous not to go back to Stratford; I think you outstay your welcome.'' Or is that just the familiar, if understandable, reluctance of a star actor to tie himself down for a small salary?

Richard Burton spent his last years talking about the Lear he never got around to playing. But Mr. Plummer does get things done. More than most of his contemporaries, and infinitely more than his two-fisted childhood idol, he has kept his weapons bright. Playing Barrymore may in part be a wistful homage to a kindred spirit: a high-living charismatic performer with a thirst for Shakespeare. It may also be an exorcism; or, more prosaically, a way of demonstrating the difference between them. One thing is certain about Barrymore, at least in his last years: he could never have played ''Barrymore.''

When he strolls into the souvenir shop across the parking lot from the Stratford Festival, it's like he's just stepped into a scene from some Shakespearean play, where saleswomen -- huddled about with eyes coyly averted -- cup their mouths and buzz buzz about the sudden appearance of this handsome figure.

No one wishes to leave for a break -- at least not while he's in the store. They all fear missing the opportunity of helping him with whatever it is he needs.

This man, sporting a pair of faded but crisply-pressed jeans and a loose-fitting sweatshirt, is Christopher Plummer. He's here to work on Barrymore, William Luce's play written partly in collaboration with Plummer, who has often been compared to the great Hollywood actor of silent films.

"He's so gorgeous," says one woman to a friend. "Flat stomach . . . nice bum -- not bad for a man his age."

The Tony-award winning actor, best known for playing opposite Julie Andrews in the 1965 movie, The Sound of Music, is 69.

From the neck down, he has the body of a 35-year-old; from the neck up, he might be pushing 55.

The Toronto-born actor -- always known for his good looks and aristocratic bearing -- has bestirred this gossip-relishing theatre town.

It's nothing new for the randy-looking Plummer whose own life -- three marriages and countless affairs -- mirrors that of Barrymore's, although he smiles at such a notion.

He'll tell you when he was breaking into the business and hadn't been to acting school and had never had a lesson on voice or anything else, he still managed to muster the confidence and finesse to get noticed.

Plummer was the enfant terrible of the stage and claims the only mistakes he ever made in those early days had more to do with his "personal behavior" than technique.

"I nearly was fired from two or three companies for not showing up on time or for showing up drunk, or being obstreperous and having an affair with a leading lady when the director was also having an affair. I always picked the wrong girl.

"Those sorts of mistakes were plentiful. . . . But they (directors and actors) forgave me, I guess, because I delivered on the stage."

In terms of the acting, Plummer is confident: "You know, you can make a brilliant mistake, and suddenly it turns into a moment of gold."

When he casts back to those years in the '50s, he maintains, "I wasn't that bad an actor. I know I was good enough and they knew they had someone to contend with when I was on the stage.

"Already I had a kind of confidence and arrogance that could propel me on, and an energy, too, even though my technique may not have been formed yet."

Ever since he was a child, he nurtured this dream of acting: "I loved music and I studied the piano. But I think I saw myself as a concert pianist."

Then Plummer discovered how easy it was to mimic people. This quickly led to acting.

Plummer's professional career started when he quit Grade 11 and joined Ottawa's Canadian Repertory Theatre.

Over a two-year period, he played some 100 roles, in addition to working for television and radio.

He made his debut on the Stratford Festival stage in 1956 in the title role of Henry V and played Hamlet and Sir Andrew Aguecheek (Twelfth Night) the following year. He returned to do four other seasons with the festival.

And while he had always done well at Stratford, according to longtime festival actor Douglas Campbell in an article in Entertaining Canadians, Plummer wasn't always that well-liked by his fellow actors.

Campbell said Plummer was hard to work with: "He never let himself become a part of the company, never believed that anybody could help him -- that we might know a thing or two about the theatre as well."

Such controversy over Plummer is not new. That partially explains why he's linked so much to Barrymore.

"As artists, we were not so different. We both did the same sort of stuff, and we were both motivated by the same sort of life.

"We like to drink, eat and be merry and have a gregarious life.

"But after a while you kind of give that up and change. But he didn't."

Both have performed the major classical roles, doing Hamlet and Macbeth, and both went into the movies.

Plummer, however, has moved around and continues to do stage work.

"Barrymore wanted either to be a great character actor, or nothing."

Unfortunately, he was seduced by Hollywood and eventually was disillusioned and destroyed by it.

Plummer is clear-headed about this, and by contrast to Barrymore feels he does what he wants. The script he's working on -- focusing upon the life of the great actor -- is something Plummer can sink his teeth into.

"I have always loved him as a larger-than-life creature who could be absolutely wonderful and pure and magical on stage, and yet be as irrelevant about his art as he wanted to be . . .

"He was the rebel who could actually give out pure gold when he wanted to."

GRAPHIC: Photo: Scott Webster, Windsor Star / WORKING ON BARRYMORE: Christopher Plummer with a display from Oedipus at Stratford's Festival Theatre.

One of the world's greatest classical actors has created one of the stage's most charming drunks

"He's almost dressed, folks," says a backstage worker at the Ahmanson Theater in Los Angeles. This Sunday matinee is an upbeat occasion -- the closing performance of a triumphant three-week run -- and the warm glow of California sunshine spilling through the stage doors fits the mood. So, as it turns out, does the jaunty attire of the star.

Only a few minutes after taking his final bows as the broken-down, self-loathing alcoholic John Barrymore -- a once great actor turned into a pathetic wreck -- Christopher Plummer emerges from his dressing room. He's wearing sneakers, a knitted shirt that says STRATFORD FESTIVAL, and white shorts. He looks like a tennis pro. "We could easily do another week or two here," Plummer says to one of his admiring visitors. "I was sort of hoping we might be able to get out of going to Sacramento, but it's selling very well -- damn it." After that, it's on to Chicago, Washington, and New Haven before the show finally reaches Toronto in November, its only Canadian engagement and a sort of homecoming for Barrymore, which premiered at Stratford in 1996.

An earnest young acting student who has been waiting patiently finally gets to ask Plummer what is no doubt a carefully rehearsed question. It concerns the physicality of his performance, the way he transforms himself for the part. "It would be very helpful if you could tell me how you make it that organic," she says.

Plummer gives her a bemused smile and replies with impeccable comic timing: "It's just years of drinking, darling."

Indeed, the parallels between Barrymore and Plummer are too obvious to be ignored. Like Barrymore, Plummer is a nervy, flamboyant actor who has not only given celebrated performances on stage and screen but also earned a reputation as one of the theatre's great carousing wild men. "I grew up at a time when drinking was incredibly fashionable," he had told me earlier, while sipping coffee in his room at the Beverly Hills Hotel, "and in my circle a lot of us were drinking ourselves to death. Fortunately, I always loved my food, and that's what saved me."

But if the first act of Plummer's life bore a striking resemblance to Barrymore's, the second act is turning out to be radically different. In his later years Barrymore was so wasted that no producer could take the chance of putting him on stage. Plummer, on the other hand, has turned out to be a survivor, and the man many consider to be the world's greatest living classical actor. Even while forging a career in a phenomenal number of movies (more than sixty), and countless TV films, Plummer has never abandoned his roots. Once every few years he goes back to the theatre, and whenever he does it's a major occasion. From his earliest stage roles, through to treacle like the film that made him a movie star, The Sound of Music, Plummer has made a trademark of aristocratic hauteur. He comes by it honestly. The great-grandson of a Canadian prime minister, Sir John Abbott, Plummer grew up in the cloistered atmosphere of one of Montreal's most proper anglophone families. He was born in Toronto, but before he even had his first birthday, his parents separated, and his mother returned to Montreal with Christopher in tow.

He was a pampered boy growing up in a house full of women (including aunts) who were all extremely well read and well educated. Plummer was regularly taken to the ballet, the opera, the theatre, and the symphony. When he got a little older, he rebelled against gentility and good taste by hanging out at Montreal's fabled night-clubs, where he learned a great deal from cabaret performers, including Edith Piaf and Frank Sinatra, trying to hold the attention of a room full of drunks. As a young actor in Montreal and Ottawa in the late 1940s, he was known as a talented but difficult young man -- quixotic and demanding, with an explosive temperament. As Plummer himself puts it: "I was quick to draw the dagger in those days, and I enjoyed shocking Puritans."

Plummer auditioned for Tyrone Guthrie when the director arrived in Canada to start the Stratford Festival. Guthrie turned him down, however; an invitation to perform there had to wait until Plummer had achieved success on Broadway, notably opposite Julie Harris in The Lark. Guthrie's successor, Michael Langham, asked him to play the title role in Henry V -- and Plummer delivered a much-talked-about performance. Driving to Stratford, Plummer told his old friend Herbert Whittaker, the journalist, that for dramatic effect he felt he should be arriving in a red Thunderbird. Whittaker told him that he didn't need the Thunderbird; his performance as Henry would be enough of an attention-getter.

Plummer was on the very short list of actors who could bring immediacy and lyricism to the language of Shakespeare. When he delivered a great passage, it was obvious that here was a man with fire and poetry in his soul. "Young Canadian actors like me were all in awe of him," recalls Richard Monette, Stratford's current artistic director, who played a supporting role when Plummer starred opposite Zoe Caldwell in Langham's sexually charged 1967 production of Antony and Cleopatra. "He was the natural successor to Laurence Olivier, because in addition to his other gifts, he had something in common with Olivier that even John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson didn't have -- a sense of being dangerous."

Plummer later joined the acting company at the National Theatre in London, when Olivier was in charge. He also appeared in several productions with the Royal Shakespeare Company, becoming one of the very few actors to work at all three Stratfords (Ontario, Connecticut, and England).

Ironically it was failing to get a role he fiercely wanted that led to one of Plummer's most amazing performances, at the Connecticut Stratford in 1981. Othello was on the playbill. Plummer wanted to perform the title role, but the part went instead to a black actor, James Earl Jones. Plummer -- who according to press interviews he gave at the time considered himself a victim of discrimination -- had to make do with the part of Iago.

But Iago turned out to be a delicious turn for him -- a slimy villain who feels spiteful because fate has conspired to make him subservient to one for whom he secretly feels contempt. Seventeen years later, his performance still looms in my memory as one of the greatest I've ever seen. With his booming Darth Vader-like voice and lumbering majesty, Jones seemed well suited to play Othello. Yet Plummer stole the show, turning Iago into an exuberant dandy who dances rings around his master. Jones was hemmed in by his own small emotional range and overshadowed by the memory of another black actor who played Othello, Paul Robeson. In contrast, Plummer's Iago was so smart and funny that the audience may have gone away with the impression Othello's real flaw was slow-wittedness.

You couldn't have blamed Jones if he had wanted to kill Plummer. Interviewed by Harry Rasky for a documentary, "Christopher Plummer: King of Players," to be seen later this season on CBC, Jones found a discreet way to praise Plummer's work in Barrymore: "I think he's at his best when he's on stage alone."

"I've always had a dislike of playing actors," Plummer admits, "but Barrymore was such a rich character that he transcends being an actor. His last great role was himself."

In William Luce's play, we see Barrymore a month before his death in 1942, trying to get through a rehearsal of Richard III, hoping to recapture some of his past glory. He has hired a prompter, but he not only has trouble remembering lines; he's plagued by all his demons. So he mixes himself a huge cocktail and creates his own jaded talk show for a supposedly empty theatre, using manic humour to hide his pain.

Plummer's Barrymore is the most charming drunk you've ever met, but the play is contrived and thin. To hear Plummer reciting bits of Shakespeare is a huge pleasure; the classical passages, though, are constantly interrupted so we can get back to Luce's feeble jokes. Plummer's performance is filled with trailers for other dramas you'd rather be watching. He makes us yearn to see him not only in the great Shakespearean roles, but in the riotous 1920s backstage comedy about all three Barrymores, The Royal Family. Plummer hits the dizzy heights of glee that Barrymore himself achieved in the deliriosly funny 1934 movie version of Twentieth Century.

Having earned glowing reviews for Barrymore on Broadway in 1997, Plummer was crowned with his second Tony award as best actor. (His first was in 1974 for the musical, Cyrano.) That would be enough for some people; certainly, he could have opted for time off with his wife, Elaine Taylor, at his country mansion in Connecticut. He even has the perfect excuse: a contract to write his autobiography.

Instead, he embraced the chance to do a gruelling tour. "Appearing live before the public is a risky business, and I love taking that risk," he explains to me in his dressing room. "I love everything about it except the monastic lifestyle it imposes. And even after two years, I keep discovering little things. I'll suddenly discover a new way of doing something. Whenever that happens, I ask myself: `Why didn't I think of that before?'"

In "King of Players," Langham recounts that the young Plummer was beset by dangerous Macbeth-like ambitions and appetites which have now vanished. Maybe, but if he has conquered his demons, Plummer still has the restless energy of a cat on the prowl. When Harry Rasky alludes to his alleged new, gentler personality, he retorts with a pointed reality check. "You have to maintain some spark of the anger you once had," Plummer says. "If you mellowed too much, you'd never want to do anything."

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): The liquid plummer

Theater history is to be made on Sept. 24 at the Music Box Theater when the dialogue of the play ''Barrymore'' will be displayed on a screen for playgoers with hearing loss. The captioning, synchronized manually with Christopher Plummer's Tony-winning performance, will scroll in red letters on a small digital screen in front of a side section of the orchestra, where 150 people can be seated.

The Theater Access Project of the Theater Development Fund said the Sept. 24 performance would be the first on Broadway to offer the service. The organization, which served as an advocate for the use of the device and will pay its developer for his services, announced that the captioning will be used later in the season when it takes school groups and others to performances of ''Jekyll and Hyde'' at the Plymouth Theater and ''The King and I'' at the Neil Simon.

''Our anticipation is this will open up a whole new audience,'' said Lisa Carling of the Theater Access Project. ''There has been such enthusiasm from people who haven't been able to go to the theater before.''

The Theater Access Project was established in 1979 to make theatergoing possible for potential audience members previously barred by disabilities. Ms. Carling said the captioning box was developed by a court stenographer, Don DePew of Manhattan, after Arlene Romoff of Ridgewood, N.J., an advocate for the deaf, expressed regret that her own hearing loss prevented her from enjoying theater by means of the infrared listening devices available in many theaters.

The Theater Development Fund said some 28 million Americans are deaf or hard of hearing, and of these, only a small percentage understand American Sign Language and can benefit from interpreted performances of Broadway shows. Many of the rest have lost hearing late in life and are not only unlikely to learn sign language, but they also hear too poorly to be helped by the infrared listening devices.

You recognize the voice immediately, the deep timbre, the resonant tone, the precise pronunciation that reminds one of teatime in the House of Lords. Christopher Plummer, after all, may have been born and raised in Canada, but he trained at the Royal Shakespeare Company, and so he is a stickler for the King's English, a bit of a contemporary Henry Higgins. He will lecture on the proper use of language before the conversation is over, but Plummer doesn't want to be so frightfully serious at first. No, he wants to tell you about the outrageous character he is portraying on the road, a bon vivant, a simply extraordinary man. He wants to tell you about John Barrymore, the prodigal son of the famous acting clan, brother of Lionel and Ethel and grandfather of Drew.

Plummer, 68, plays the rebellious fellow in a star vehicle called "Barrymore," which stops at the Colonial Theatre this week before heading to Broadway. He's just tickled about the role, which is quite juicy in all senses of the word.

"Well, Barrymore was one of the gadfly personalities of the early part of the century, and he was more than just an extraordinary actor," Plummer begins, speaking with the authority of a man who would prefer not to be interrupted, thank you very much. "He was a rebel, a wit, a libertine, everything you want. There is something very attractive about rebels who had such extraordinary gifts and chose to destroy them. There is a sort of poignancy that is fascinating."

Plummer pauses, ever so briefly. "In fact, when I was a kid of about 14, I read Gene Fowler's biography 'Good Night, Sweet Prince.' The book made me decide to become an actor because Barrymore's life was so tortuous and extraordinary and at times so wonderful. I thought, 'Isn't this an exciting profession? You can do all those bad things and get away with it.' " Plummer continues, analyzing Barrymore's life, his irreverence, his drinking bouts, his misused talents.

But wait. Why was Plummer reading a theater tome at the age of 14? "Montreal was a racy town in those days," Plummer says, his words clipped with icy politeness. "I wasn't shocked by anything in the book." The question is rephrased: Why wasn't he reading the stuff popular with adolescent boys of his

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The Boston Globe, January 19, 1997

day, comic books or adventure stories or whatever youngsters read in the 1940s?

"Oh, I see. I wasn't brought up that way. I was raised to read the great stuff. I was reading Shakespeare at 10, 11, 12." Plummer enjoyed a rather genteel childhood, growing up with his mother and grandparents in Montreal. He's often said that the atmosphere was old school, describing the environment as "Edwardian colonial," the type of household where youngsters devoured novels about renegade actors for breakfast and fed on classics for lunch.

But despite all that proper training, Plummer wasn't exactly Little Lord Fauntleroy when he followed Barrymore's cue and entered the acting profession right after high school. He and the other classical actors of his generation closed many a bar in their early days.

"Well, sure, I was a bit like Barrymore," Plummer admits, the voice a little softer, the laugh a little lighter. "It was fashionable to drink and be gregarious and rebellious. I got in with quite a lot of actors in ondon and New York - Burton and O'Toole and Robards and Finney - we were all ell-raisers for a while. We all tried to imitate the Edmund Keans and the Barrymores f the past. We admired their outrageousness and impatience."

Plummer tells a story about his own outrageous impatience, when he was a young actor in "King John" at the Stratford Festival in Ontario. There was a gentleman in the front row, reading the play during the performance. Plummer sidled downstage and proceeded to knock the script out of the unsuspecting man's hands. "I felt guilty about it later, because the poor guy had just otten out of jail for diamond swindling or something. He hadn't been to the theater for years and he was fascinated. He really wanted to be there, even though his behavior didn't show that." The voice emits a twinge of guilt for a fleeting second, but the laugh has a tone of gentle admonition. Don't sit in the first row at the Colonial and read during "Barrymore." And don't say you weren't warned.

When he wasn't knocking plays out of convicts' hands, Plummer was establishing himself as a first-rate classical actor, performing all the great Shakespearean roles on three different Stratford stages (Ontario, England and Connecticut). He has played many of the roles he read during those genteel childhood days in Montreal: the Prince of Denmark, various kings of England (including Richard III), the Thane of Cawdor. His Iago, against James Earl Jones' Othello, was hailed as definitive.

His Macbeth, against Glenda Jackson's Lady Macbeth, was respectable, even if the production was haunted by the kind of curse that theater folklore says surrounds the tragedy. This infamous production, which played the Colonial in 1988, was plagued by more than double trouble: scores of injuries, 26 bouts of the flu, six cast changes, three directors, two set designers and one broken tooth. Plummer would just as soon forget the whole thing.

"I've wiped it from my mind. It is an extraordinary piece of masochism; I don't know why we do it. Everyone has a preconceived notion of who Macbeth is -it's like coming to watch Jesus Christ act. It's almost impossible to satisfy anyone."

Even so, Plummer prefers the classics and the stage to any other form of acting. He, like so many of his colleagues, has done a fair amount of film and

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television, and Plummer is perfectly honest about his motivation. "Of course, I've done my share of idiotic roles," he says. "Everybody does; Olivier did idiotic roles. You have to go through that to earn a living. But if you can make an idiotic role fairly convincing, you've got it made. When the great one comes along, it's a breeze."

The actor isn't going to apologize for the films, which include such titles as "Red-Blooded American Girl," "Rock-a-Doodle" and "Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead." Of course, there's that movie, the 1965 musical that made him a household name. We are talking, of course, about "The Sound of Music," the musical with nuns and Nazis and children that Plummer has affectionately referred to as "The Sound of Mucus."

"I have not disparaged the movie," Plummer says, "I've kidded it. If people remember me for that, that's fate. But my best work has always been in the theater. That's where all of our best work is; we have control. You're stuck with us; you can't cut away from us. In a film, we have no control. We can end up wearing a skirt at the end of the movie."

The character Plummer is now playing onstage, John Barrymore, also did his best work in the theater, despite spending many years as a matinee idol in silent pictures. In "Barrymore," the actor is at the end of his life, and he's trying to make a comeback onstage in "Richard III." The play unfolds at the Plymouth Theatre in New York, where a rather pickled Barrymore is assisted by an offstage prompter who tries to help him remember his lines. The actor then reminisces about his life in the theater, telling salty stories and singing a few bar tunes along the way.

last year, Plummer has received rave reviews for his performance; the script, by William Luce, has been criticized for being shallow without a strong plot line. Luce, who also wrote the wildly successful Emily Dickinson bio-drama, "The Belle of Amherst," has been working on the play during the pre-Broadway tour.

"We continue to work on it, of course," Plummer says, although he dismisses the criticism. "We've put in all sorts of colors, more humor, some hint of madness. We've changed the ending. It's quite remarkable, and the audiences have adored it."

Plummer suspects some folks might want to see his Barrymore all weepy and full of self-pity at the end, which is something he refuses to do. "You can't tell everyone how tragic you are. Barrymore would never have done that. There was something wonderfully brave about him. He would have gone out with a laugh. Like Cyrano, it was more fun for him to fight when there was no chance of winning."

Cyrano, in fact, was more than a fighting role for Plummer. He won the Tony Award in 1974 for his performance in the musical "Cyrano de Bergerac." He was nominated for the Tony again in 1982 for his performance in "Othello"; that same year, his daughter Amanda Plummer won the Tony for her performance in "Agnes of God." It was the first time a father and daughter had been nominated in the same year.

"It would have been nice if both Plummers had won," the actor says, pausing. "Of course, I was thrilled that she won. I really was."

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Plummer has said he would like to work with his daughter (the child of his first wife, Tammy Grimes) someday. He'd also like to play Falstaff now that he's reached the appropriate age and perhaps have a go at Prospero. But he doesn't long to play King Lear, one of the most coveted roles for older actors.

"I'm not sure about playing King Lear. I find him an awful whiner. He kvetches a lot, as they say on the street. It's a difficult part to play; it's utterly exhausting," he says, letting out a small sigh.

The man does have his opinions, especially about his beloved Shakespeare. "The classics are so dead, except for Kenneth Branagh, who keeps trying to revive them and looks exactly the same in all of them." He pauses ever so briefly and adds, "I do admire Branagh's chutzpah. He's trying to do it at a time when it's hard to film the classics."

Plummer, after all, has been studying the classics since he was 10, 11, 12. He doesn't object to contemporary versions of the works, as long as the language remains pristine. "You can do it in a dinner jacket, a jockstrap or a bikini," he says. "It doesn't matter as long as, for God's sake, you honor the verse the way Mr. Shakespeare wrote it. I'm old-fashioned that way, but I think I'm right."

He prefers his Shakespeare by the book, just as he did when he was a youngster reading the stuff in that genteel household. But when it comes to reading in the theater, be careful, especially when watching Christopher Plummer do his star turn as John Barrymore.

"Will you be there on opening night?" Plummer wants to know. Why, sure. A pause. "I hope you won't be in the front row reading a comic book," he says, chuckling merrily as he hangs up the phone. The laughter lingers; so does the warning.

GRAPHIC: PHOTO, 1. John Barrymore, says Plummer, was "a rebel, a wit, a libertine." 2. With Julie Andrews in "The Sound of Music," a movie he kids affectionately.

There's no one else quite like him these days. Christopher Plummer belongs to an endangered species of elegant, classically trained actors capable of playing anything from the crassest villain to the most sublime hero.

His career has included roles as diverse as a Klingon general in "Star Trek VI" and the romantic hero of "The Sound of Music." Now, his Tony Award-winning performance in William Luce's "Barrymore," a one-man show evoking the life of the legendary John Barrymore, demonstrates the range of Mr. Plummer's talents.

Taking the show on the road, Plummer recently did a turn in Denver before moving "Barrymore" along to San Francisco. (Other North American venues will follow.)

Sliding gracefully up and down the scale of Barrymore's complex personality - from the lows of his bad-boy limericks to the heights of Shakespearean verse - Plummer says he didn't have to prepare for the role.

"I read 'Good Night, Sweet Prince' [a biography] when I was 14," he said over breakfast in Denver last week, "and I'd seen all his movies, silent as well as sound, well before I decided to become an actor. And I think the image of Barrymore largely made me want to become an actor.

"Don't forget he was the last of the great actors of that period (the late '30s, early '40s). Those creatures who influence you when you're young become part of you. So all I had to do was pull something out of me that I remembered. He was some personality - a larger-than-life character."

Barrymore was one of the great Hamlets of the early 20th century, but the fact that he played only two great classical roles (the other was Richard III) strikes Plummer as a great shame. Barrymore went aground in Hollywood. Plummer himself has negotiated the rocky shoals of show business, dividing his time among his great love, theater, movies, and TV. He is about to begin a new film directed by Michael Mann ("The Last of the Mohicans," "Heat") and costarring Al Pacino and Russell Crowe about last year's "60 Minutes" expose on the tobacco industry.

The Canadian-born actor began his Broadway career in the early 1950s and moved right over to television at the same time. "I started in the golden age of TV. I was doing theater, but television was the way young actors could make a living - all young actors had to work on the box. But TV was live and so like theater. There was an immediacy that was just so exciting. And there were just wonderful writers working then on TV.... Actually it is a medium of words," he says.

"But the stage offers the greatest words available - the great literature," Plummer adds. "In the movies, everything is spelled out literally. You see everything; nothing is left to the imagination. The theater is the medium of the imagination. The audience is required to work - an exercise of the imagination. You don't have to have a mountain; you can have a light that suggests a mount. It's the writing and the performance that sells the evening.

"The great roles are in the theater," he says. "I am one of the few stage animals left, I guess, who can still tackle all that stuff, because my body and voice have been [classically] trained for it. I feel like a dinosaur - but a happy dinosaur."

Plummer is often asked to speak to students in drama schools and conservatories, and he tries to convince them of the importance of classical training - which includes everything from the techniques of projection and stage presence to the complexities of verse plays. "The theater is the place to learn the craft," he says. "My advice ... is to put in some time on the stage because your mind and your technique will be formed there and make all the rest so much easier."

Wlliam Luce's "Barrymore," which opened last night at the National Theatre for a limited run, is weak tea that its star, Christopher Plummer (who won a Tony for his performance), periodically convinces you is fine brandy. There's no play in this play about an actor, but there's certainly an actor. The evening isn't really about Barrymore, or even about Plummer -- it's about acting, about what style can reveal.

Luce's conceit is that the audience joins John Barrymore as he rehearses for an abortive 1942 stage comeback as Richard III. Under the prodding of his offstage prompter (John Plumpis), the actor takes an unenthusiastic stab at learning his lines, but spends most of the evening reminiscing profanely and throwing out one-liners. The jokes creak more than the aging Barrymore is meant to, but fortunately the material is in the capable hands of director Gene Saks, a past master of turning comic dross into something that can pass for gold.

Few people alive today ever saw John Barrymore on the stage, and not many have seen more than a couple of his movies (the best known are "A Bill of Divorcement," Katharine Hepburn's first movie, and "Grand Hotel," both from 1932). Yet his name still resonates for theatergoers. When Paul Rudnick brought Barrymore's ghost onstage in "I Hate Hamlet," audiences immediately got the point -- this was the ghost of theater past, overwrought, histrionic, yet possessed of genius. (Barrymore remains America's most critically acclaimed Hamlet.)

Barrymore hailed from the days pre-Brando and pre-television, before realism was the acting vogue. His made his legit stage debut in 1903, at the age of 21, and started in the movies when the silents still ruled. Even in his later film performances he retains the elan and flash of an old-style actor.

Even more importantly than his psychological insights into the man, Plummer has grasped Barrymore's essential style: elegantly hammy, with surprising emotional weight. Barrymore's acting was about the way genius can redeem corniness and turn it into art, and Plummer's performance is about the way feeling can redeem a man's showy shallowness and make it something affecting. This Barrymore is an old fraud, all attitude and papier-mache, but if you prick him he bleeds.

Plummer looks perfect: fabulously ruined. He's funny here, something his roles usually don't call for. His high point, in fact, is singing and capering to "You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby" while costumed as Richard III. This loony little routine doesn't have a lot to do with Barrymore's life, but it says worlds about his go-to-hell audacity, the quality that made his acting so exciting, the quality that enabled him to carelessly throw his talent away.

Plummer wears a suit and fedora in the first act and the Richard costume in the second. Interestingly, he seems even looser in period clothes than in modern streetwear -- he has more sweep in Act 2, and more genuine playfulness. Who can say if it's Plummer or Barrymore who comes more into his own in artificial dress? It seems an appropriate thing for an actor, and Plummer is, after all, acting an actor with all his own theatrical experience, cunning and consummate skill.

Barrymore, by William Luce. Directed by Gene Saks. Sets and costumes, Santo Loquasto. Lights, Natasha Katz. At the National Theatre through Nov. 8. Call 202-628-6161.

[Illustration]
PHOTO,,CYLLA VON TIEDEMANN CAPTION: Christopher Plummer wears the role of stage legend John Barrymore well at the National Theatre. ec

If there's one thing that William Luce's "Barrymore" does, it's show off Christopher Plummer's protean thesp talents. But this thin, one-man show -- with its one-liners, dirty limericks, meandering anecdotes and unfinished scenes -- accomplishes little beyond showcasing its lead. Plotless, its sole point is to flaunt the talents of a great actor, a titan of the theater. Not Barrymore ... Plummer. If the life of the great John Barrymore happens to be the convenient vehicle for this exercise, well, so much the better. But let there be no mistake made: The evening belongs to Plummer.

Americans, especially those with a soft spot for film, will best remember Plummer as autocratic Capt. von Trapp in the film version of Rodgers and Hammerstein's "The Sound of Music." But that's sort of like recalling that Franklin Roosevelt was once Undersecretary of the Navy. Plummer has been on Broadway since 1954 and has acted with Katherine Cornell, Judith Anderson, Julie Harris, James Earl Jones, Glenda Jackson and Jason Robards. And he has been directed by Eva Le Gallienne, Elia Kazan and Mike NicholsMike Nichols, among many others. So Luce's play, albeit something of a tip of the hat to the Great Profile, is really more about Christopher Plummer than anything else.

And, indeed, Plummer, who won the Tony for the role, does not disappoint.

He delivers the straight lines and the punch lines with equal aplomb; his timing is impeccable. Here, he gestures wildly and subtly, gives spot-on impersonations, and even makes serious moments in Shakespeare funny. In lesser hands, Luce's play would fall to pieces, there's so little to it.

The show opens with a blue-suited Plummer crossing the stage as Barrymore at 60, drunk and disheveled but full of bonhomie. Almost instantly, the fourth wall breaks, as he tells the audience he's back for a night of Shakespeare. "Richard III," primarily, but perhaps a bit of "Hamlet," too. But Barrymore's famous inability to concentrate (a product of drink) intrudes, and soon nostalgia, reverie and just a touch of regret substitute for Shakespearean scenes.

The actor recalls his equally famous siblings (Lionel and Ethel) and his four ex-wives (none memorable). "I don't have to tell you divorces cost more than marriages," he says. "But, God dammit, they're worth it!" He also chats about his eccentric childhood, which was often less than happy. "Staggering is a sign of strength," his drunken father was fond of saying. "Only the weak have to be carried home."

Through all this, a patient prompter, Frank (John Plumpis), unseen until the curtain call, cajoles the once great actor. Get started with the show, he repeatedly urges Barrymore, continually feeding him cues, to little avail. But Frank more often prompts memories, and that keeps this show going. Though only two hours long, Luce's play has its longueurs, even with the ever-energetic Plummer holding center stage.

The work of set and costume designer Santo Loquasto, whose credits include "Ragtime" and "Grand Hotel," is understated, yielding rewards gradually. The second-act costumes are the ones to watch for, but to say more would spoil the effect. The set itself is basically a stage with some props, the most amusing of which is a liquor cart from the Algonquin Hotel. Natasha Katz's lighting is utilitarian, but it's hard to knock straightforwardness.

It's tough to say how much credit director Gene Saks, long linked with successful comedies, should receive for Plummer's excellent timing and delivery. Certainly, there are no false steps here. But perhaps Saks could have tightened Luce's play. Is an intermission really necessary? Couldn't some careful trimming have given audiences essentially the same work at 90 minutes?

Frankly, it hardly matters. Audiences will flock for Plummer, as well they should, for here is an actor, much like John Barrymore, who simply adores the spotlight, and one who knows just what to do when he's in it.

Sets and costumes, Santo Loquasto; lighting, Natasha Katz; production stage manager, Robin Rumpf Corbett. Opened and reviewed Sept. 9, 1998; closes Sept. 27. Running time: 2 HOURS.

John Barrymore set the Hollywood standard for a certain type of drunken rakishness, defining an image of the actor as charming, self-destructive rogue that continues to this day. Sadly (or not), that's about the sum total of Barrymore's legacy, his stage triumphs lost to the past and his film career remembered by few and cherished by fewer. William Luce's new play "Barrymore" doesn't add much to our understanding or knowledge of the legendary thespian, and whether it contributes to any affection will depend on one's tolerance for the charismatic lush type (a romantic notion best left to Barrymore's own bygone era). But the play, essentially a one-man show, does provide one of our own greats --- Christopher Plummer --- with a welcome and entertaining return to the New York stage. The performance and Luce's snappy one-liners make for a pleasant vehicle. Luce's writing, never less than amusing and always efficient in sculpting a tale from biographical fact, was better applied to the richer character of Emily Dickinson in "The Belle of Amherst," the work that pretty much became the benchmark for the one-person bio-play. "Barrymore" falls closer to the playwright's "Lillian" (about Hellman): fine as far as it goes, even if it goes no farther than a basic common knowledge about its subject. (Play also has the disadvantage of hitting New York so soon after last year's similar one-man-show "Jack," starring Nicol Williamson and covering much the same ground).

Like "Lillian," which starred Zoe Caldwell, "Barrymore" has the great fortune of a fine actor. Plummer nails Barrymore's charm, a mix of aristocratic flourish and low-rent leanings (the character recites crude limericks with a vocal delivery more associated with Shakespeare). Indeed, so much of the play's humor relies on the shock of gutter talk regally intoned that the device begins to wear a bit thin.

"Barrymore" takes place just a month before the actor's death. His ability to remember Shakespeare's lines all but decimated by years of alcoholism, Barrymore, in natty double-breasted suit, is backstage at a theater (nicely rendered by Santo Loquasto) rehearsing a last-gasp attempt to recreate the stage role that brought him fame, the Bard's Richard III. Ostensibly there to run lines with a stage manager (Michael Mastro in a vocal, but off-stage, role), Barrymore instead turns to a more pleasant diversion: regaling us with tales about his colorful past (his long-term memory apparently unaffected by the drink).

Wonderfully told (and fluidly staged by director Gene Saks), the anecdotes provide snapshots of Barrymore's childhood, his siblings (Plummer does terrifically wicked takes on Lionel and Ethel), his rogue of a father, his beloved grandmother and all four of his marriages, or "bus accidents" as Barrymore calls them. Despite his professed love for his wives, the character subscribes to (and the play doesn't question) the drunkard's excuse of blaming women for his downfall.

His most affectionate memories are reserved for his long-ago best friend Ned, a young playwright who encouraged the actor to tackle the classics. The tenderness with which he recalls Ned would certainly lead audiences to question Barrymore's romantic leanings if the play didn't go to pains to insist on his heterosexuality.

The short second act ("Barrymore" runs at an hour and 40 minutes including a 20-minute intermission) focuses mostly on anecdotes from the actor's Hollywood period, with the comic tales heightened by the hunchbacked Richard III costume Plummer dons. Throughout both acts, the anecdotes are enlivened by Luce's funny one-liners and Plummer's expert delivery of them.

"Our honeymoon seems like only yesterday," the character says and, without missing a beat adds, "and you know what a lousy day yesterday was." More often, the jokes are risque: "What were you last in, Mr. Barrymore?" asks a fan. "I believe," the actor responds, "it was Joan Crawford."

As good as he is at the comedy, Plummer is equally adept at the pathos --- tragedy seems too lofty a description --- of the broken man. The audience will know long before the character admits that "Richard III" is a pipedream, that the actor's glory days are history. "Barrymore" is a congenial reminder of that past, and Plummer makes us care more than John Barrymore ever could.

Set and costumes, Santo Loquasto; lighting, Natasha Katz; production stage manager, Susan Konynenburg. Opened March 25, 1997; reviewed March 20. Running time: 1 hour, 40 min.

March 14, 1997 Chicago review

April 4, 1997 NY review

The John Gilbert Appreciation Society is mad at Christopher Plummer and his one-man show "Barrymore," and they're not being silent about it, either. They're protesting -- by mail, through newsletters and over the Internet.

Wait a second. The John Gilbert Appreciation Society? Well, there is one, devoted to the memory of the silent-screen idol who died in 1936 at age 36. Gilbert was Hollywood's biggest star ("The Big Parade," "The Merry Widow"), but when the talkies came in his career nose-dived.

The society was founded in 1985 by Philadelphian Alice Johnson, 85, a jolly lady with a sly sense of humor who's given to making grand, deadpan pronouncements and then laughing uproariously. "I achieved the pinnacle of my destiny when I formed this club," she says. "I've reached as high as I can go." Then comes the laugh.

Society members contend that their guy got a raw deal from film historians, and they have a point. In the '60s and '70s, before video and cable made his films available, most historians repeated the falsehood that Gilbert had a high-pitched voice that didn't match his macho image.

"To me, his voice was velvety," says Johnson. "Very sexy."

Which brings us to "Barrymore." In the second act of the show, at Herbst Theatre, Plummer, playing the legendary actor John Barrymore, comments on Gilbert's hard luck. "There he was, the No. 1 he-man in pictures. Then the talkies came, and everybody found out he talked like this," Plummer says, going into a soft falsetto.

In the same falsetto, he tells of Gilbert's coming to him and asking, "What happened to my career? Why did they turn on me -- Why? Why? Why?"

It's a funny bit, but the Gilbert fans aren't laughing. Neither is Leatrice Gilbert Fountain, Gilbert's daughter and biographer. "What they're doing is gross, unkind and wrong," says Fountain. "Anyone who -- has seen any of his 11 talkies knows it's plain not true. To have this perpetrated night after night in a full theater -- it breaks my heart. I wrote to the producer and to Plummer, but I never got an answer."

Plummer says he wasn't aware of the controversy and laughs when the subject is broached. "Oh, God," he says, "there are always these societies who get upset if their hero is attacked. They're fanatics, and an awful lot of fanatics don't have a sense of humor."

Johnson has no problem with the fanatic label. "When it comes to John Gilbert, I plead guilty," she says -- and laughs. "I've always been more or less crazy about the guy. I married three men who reminded me of him. The marriages didn't work out, but what the heck?"

But it's not just fanatics who have raised objections. Diane McEntyre, who has run several articles on the Gilbert-"Barrymore" flap on her Web site, the Silents Majority (www.mdle.com/ClassicFilms/), says, "There was nothing wrong with Gilbert's voice."

The Voice. Every discussion of John Gilbert comes down to the Voice. "He did not have a manly voice," Plummer says. "He did not have a good voice." But Sheryl Stinchcum, 50, a Gilbert Society member from Virginia, disagrees. "He had a very manly voice," she says. "I think it's unmanly of Plummer to do what he does in this play -- to misrepresent an actor who can't defend himself, just for a laugh."

To get a little outside perspective, voice and speech coaches Margaret Loft, professor emeritus of Southern Methodist University, and Judy Davis, who is based in Oakland, listened to a tape of Gilbert's voice. Both found the elocution artificial -- "His diction is terrible," says Davis -- but they agreed that his voice was not high-pitched. "All he needed was a good vocal coach," says Loft.

As for the playwright, William Luce admits that he had no clear recollection of the voice when he wrote those lines but based his information on a 1964 book called "The Barrymores" by Hollis Alpert. "I'm not revising the play," he says. But he'd be willing to cut the lines if Plummer agreed. "It would be up to him. It would be his decision."

Johnson says she plans to urge the Gilbert Society's members -- there are 80 nationwide -- to write to Plummer imploring him to drop the Gilbert bit.

The most complete and convincing Barrymore quote on the voice subject is found in a book called "The Second Handshake" by Will Fowler, who, ironically, is acknowledged in the "Barrymore" program for supplying basic material.

That quote should serve as the last word: "Gilbert was one of the finest actors of the day on screen. That horses-- about his voice being high. . . . It was normal as hell."

Caption: (1) Fans of silent-screen sex symbol John Gilbert say their idol had a "velvety" voice, not the high-pitched, effeminate one portrayed in "Barrymore.", (2) John Gilbert, a silent-screen star who also made 11 talkies, in the 1927 film "12 Miles Out." PHOTO

The rewards of "Barrymore," the Broadway vehicle that opened Wednesday at the Herbst Theatre, are what the remarkable Christopher Plummer finds in the wreckage. In one great actor's homage to another, Plummer embodies Barrymore as a tangle of contradictions -- elegant and bawdy, addled and acute, tender and blunt. The result is something truthful, darkly funny and moving that redeems William Luce's pedestrian script.

In his glittering gaze, Plummer catches a life at the vanishing point, stripping away sentiment and resisting false epiphanies. The essence lies in the unresolved fragments: an old song, a dirty limerick, an unsettled score with one of his four wives, a friend's kindness, a childhood terror of the dark.

Plummer doesn't want to make Jack Barrymore add up or see the light. He trains his formidable technique on the mystery and muddle of a man who's run out the string.

The truth is rooted in the details: the absurd raffish airs and alcoholic tremor, a thought plunging into silence, the exquisite timing of a joke, a startled confrontation with a mirror. It's a one-man cosmic shrug, impudent and sad.

"Barrymore" is set in 1942, a month before the actor's death. He's rented a theater to rehearse lines from "Richard III," in hopes of reviving one of his greatest roles.

Goaded by an offstage prompter (John Plumpis), the 60-year-old star can barely put two of Shakespeare's lines together. He mixes himself a huge cocktail and lurches into a disheveled retrospective of his life. He mimics his famous siblings Lionel and Ethel, blearily reviews his marriages and summons up stray memories of a career that ran from matinee idol to Shakespearean master to Hollywood "sellout," in Ethel's view.

Plummer, projecting the Barrymore shine in pinstripes, a sporty gray pompadour and lustrous voice, delivers the script's one-liners with a craftsman's satisfaction.

"Divorces cost more than marriages," he booms, "but goddamn it, they're worth it."

" `Kindly remember I'm a lady,' " he recalls gossip columnist Louella Parsons instructing him. "Your secret's safe with me," he rejoices.

Luce, whose other plays include the Emily Dickinson bio "The Belle of Amherst" and "Zelda: The Last Flapper," throws in an obligatory crisis-of-the-spirit scene in the second act. "You're worse than a drunk," the prompter melodramatically accuses. "You're a coward."

But Plummer won't bite on the cliche. He's hard flint under the songs and jokes and reminiscences. "There's nothing as dead as a dead actor," he says without a shred of self-pity, then exits on a jaunty laugh line.

Plummer, whose own heroic career has spanned Shakespeare, Pinter and sunny Hollywood ("The Sound of Music"), seems form-fitted to this role the way Robert Morse was to Truman Capote in "Tru." It goes beyond a strong facial resemblance and vocal echo. At 71, Plummer plays Barrymore with an intuitive affinity for the fading star.

Plummer brings the fuzziness into sharp-edged focus. A pause draws on. His body sags wearily to one side on Richard's throne. His penetrating stare turns inward, then blank. Shakespeare's lines provide a few placid pools, but his failing memory dries them up. The limericks and "Yes Sir! That's My Baby" are easier to remember.

Broadway veteran Gene Saks directs with a sure hand, punctuat ing the shadows of Santo Loquasto's sepia-toned set with a few blasts of light. Plummer flinches, but he never evades the truth. He displays his drinker's trembling hands, confesses that beautiful women are his only interest and acknowledges just one regret -- that he couldn't watch himself onstage.

"I had a helluva life," he exults, "for a man who's been dead 15 years."

In "Barrymore," Plummer gets both halves of the paradox right. In this vital portrait of a man who's all used up, he's totally alive.

Caption: Christopher Plummer plays actor John Barrymore, rehearsing for an unlikely comeback a month before his death, in William Luce's "Barrymore" at Herbst Theatre. PHOTO

John Barrymore was one of the great figures of the early 20th century stage and of the silent and early talking screen. Known for his matinee-idol profile, he was a man of enormous mischief and charisma. To anyone familiar with his performances, just the thought of him incites a warm, what-a-character sort of feeling, a mix of admiration and amusement.

Barrymore was absolutely one of a kind, and yet he was not inimitable -- at least not in the literal sense of the word. Barrymore was marvelously "imitatable." Actor Fredric March often adopted his manner, and even now, years after Barrymore's death, it's difficult to see him in a film without, at least once, trying to talk like him.

IRRESISTIBLE AND INFECTIOUS

He was that irresistible, that infectious, that much fun, that cool.

One actor who has been giving in to the temptation to "do" Barrymore is Christopher Plummer, who played him on Broadway and now is taking the show on tour. On August 4, "Barrymore," a one-man show by William Luce, makes its Bay Area debut at the Herbst Theatre in San Francisco, where it will run through September 6.

Plummer didn't study Barrymore's films before slipping into the role. "I didn't have to. Most of the films I've seen over and over," Plummer says by phone. "He was a hero of mine since I was a child. He's part of my subconscious. I loved his humor, his glamour, his daring. I also loved the seedy side and the vulnerable side. That's touching, too."

Barrymore was a renowned classical actor, whose "Hamlet" -- which ran on Broadway -- is considered one of the greatest of the century. In the silent-film days, he was a swashbuckling romantic hero. In the talkies, he graduated to more mature roles, though he still cut a dashing figure when he starred in "Grand Hotel" (1932) at age 50, opposite Greta Garbo.

But it's his humor that most appeals to Plummer. "He was a great comic actor. He was like Falstaff," Plummer says. "He had the size of personality we don't see anymore. Orson (Welles) was the last one. He was a man with a huge, gargantuan attack on life."

Barrymore was also a notorious womanizer -- Katharine Hepburn once recalled being confronted by a naked Barrymore during the making of her debut film, "A Bill of Divorcement" (1932). But she also praised his generosity. "Katharine Hepburn told me that she never met a more generous actor," Plummer says. "Throughout the film you can see him turning his back to the camera to put the focus on her."

"Barrymore" takes place in 1942, several months before the actor finally drank himself to death at age 60. "He's a little bit pickled," Plummer says. "He's permanently pickled, and he goes in and out of it. That's how it is with people who drink an enormous amount. There are flashes of sobriety -- and then back to the slight slurring. But he's still full of vitality. He wore natty suits right up until the end. He still tried to be well dressed, even though by this time everything was wrong with him."

Plummer doesn't try to imitate Barrymore. "You can't do a carbon copy. It would be fake," he says. "I do a mix of Barrymore and me together. The whole purpose is to suggest him, not mimic him. Though, of course, I look like him. I come on very Barrymore. Both our personalities meld together. It took quite a while for that to happen."

BARRYMORE'S WIDOW APPROVED

Recently, Plummer did the show with Barrymore's 84-year-old widow, Elaine Barrie, in the audience. "I was very nervous. I thought, `She really knows him.' So that night I put on more Barrymore than usual -- I thought I'd better. And she liked it very much. She said, `I closed my eyes, and I heard Jack.' Then she came back and brought some friends -- and sent me some of Jack's old love letters, very passionate, very private letters."

Plummer, 69, was born in Montreal and was launched as a Shakespearean actor on the Broadway stage while still in his mid-20s. He had no trouble adapting to Barrymore's style of acting.

"His style isn't strange to me, since I'm a classical actor. Every now and then he's exag gerated, but he can also be terribly simple. I try to do Barrymore doing `Hamlet' as simply as possible, because I believe that's how he played it."

BRIDGING THE CENTURIES

If Barrymore were alive today, Plummer believes, he would still be successful. "I think any great actor -- and I really believe John Barrymore at one time had greatness -- any great actor bridges the centuries. I've heard recordings of Edwin Booth doing `Othello' -- they have the recordings at Yale -- and he's just wonderfully simple. In terms of acting style, I think Barrymore bridges the early and the late part of this century."

Plummer has been starring in "Barrymore" on and off for a year and a half. "For acting, I like stage better than film. But I like the life of film better," says Plummer, who has appeared in a few dozen films, including "The Sound of Music" and "The Man Who Would Be King." "Life in the theater is pretty much nonexistent. If you're doing eight shows a week, there's not much life.

"Stage vanishes as quickly as it closes. It's not immortalized, but that's the very thing of it," Plummer says. "There's a mysterious magic about it that can't be captured. Video can't capture it. The minute you tape it, it becomes another medium."

`BARRYMORE'

The William Luce play runs August 4 through September 6 at Herbst Theatre, 401 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco. Tickets: $25-$60. Call: (415) 776-1999 (BASS).

Caption: (1) In "Barrymore," Christopher Plummer (far right) portrays John Barrymore (at right with Joan Crawford in "Grand Hotel') PHOTO (2)

"Barrymore" continues at the Shubert Performing Arts Center, 247 College St., New Haven through Sunday. Performances are tonight at 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m.; Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. Tickets are $28 to $50. Tickets and information: (203) 562- 5666.

In "Barrymore," Christopher Plummer gives a performance of two lifetimes.

In the William Luce play, which opened Tuesday at the Shubert Performing Arts Center in New Haven for a one-week run, Plummer brings John Barrymore back to life in full glory, with all the ribald humor, the acting brilliance, the witty irreverence and the cynical self- awareness that made up the actor's self-destructive life.

It's an amazing performance and one that earned Plummer his second Tony Award when he played the role on Broadway several seasons back. (His first was in the musical "Cyrano.")

But it's also a pinnacle of Plummer's own career, one that has been seasoned with great Shakespearean and classical roles, along with varied forays to Hollywood, and even a personal demon or two. But it is a lifetime of art and craft and living that makes Plummer's performance nothing less than dazzling.

Watch Plummer on the Shubert stage, where Barrymore himself once played his great roles, and you witness a true master of the theater. How easily the part could have turned to parody of ham. But Plummer is spellbinding as the grand man who wears a jaunty Fedora and a kingly crown as if he were born for both. Look deep into Plummer's eyes and you see the depth of complexity he brings to the role, the frightened man hiding behind the bravado, the loneliness and regret, the look of a living ghost.

The piece is directed with a perfect sense of theatricality by stage veteran Gene Saks. And there's lots of juice in the script by Luce, who has made one- person shows a cottage industry, with works such as "Belle of Amherst," "Lillian," "Lucifer's Child" and "Zelda: The Last Flapper."

Luce is a skillful writer who knows that actors need more than interesting people to play, they need interesting moments to play.

And in "Barrymore," he gives Plummer an endless series of moments to remember, from his first entrance -- where he is clearly in high spirits and in danger of crash-landing right on the stage -- to his final exit, where he leaves not with a wimper but a flourish. Everything in between is endlessly entertaining, revelatory, disturbing, charming, heartbreaking and fine. If the play doesn't transcend the limits of the genre, then at least it gives Plummer every opportunity to be glorious in ways that are special to the theater.

The play takes place during the last days of Barrymore, just before his death in 1942. He has rented a stage where he goes over lines with an off-stage prompter, hoping he can gear up to revive one of his great triumphs of his career, his performance 20 years earlier as Richard III.

But his memory for lines has been destroyed, but not his memory of his colorful life, or at least snatches of his life that come to him like hallucinatory flashes from a reveler's dream: the moment when a writer believes that his talent could be truly great and not just be seen in "the family business" of acting; his series of disastrous marriages ("all four wives were bus accidents"); tales of Hollywood highjinks; the recollections of a cold father, clever siblings and a caring grandmother who tells him to fight against the darkness and the demons with the brave cry: "I have a wonderful power."

It is quickly evident to all, --including himself, --that Barrymore's great roles are behind him: save one. Himself. His last hurrah is as a man who looks back at a rare talent lost beyond recovery or reform and waves a fond adieu.

John Plumpis, as the off-stage prompter, gives a solid a performance as if he were sharing the spotlight downstage center. Not that anyone could dare to share the light with Barrymore or Plummer. Theirs are two lives, two performances, two men of the theater that you meet just once in a lifetime. To see them both in one evening is a night to remember.

[Illustration] PHOTO: (b&w), CYLLA VON TIEDEMANN; Caption: CHRISTOPHER PLUMMER plays the title role in "Barrymore" a play about the last days of John Barrymore. The play continues through Sunday at the Shubert Performing Arts Center in New Haven.

"Barrymore" plays the Shubert Performing Arts Center, 247 College St., New Haven, Tuesday through Nov. 22. Performances are Tuesday at 7:30 p.m.; Wednesday at 2 and 7:30 p.m.; Thursday at 7:30 p.m.; Friday at 8 p.m.; Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m.; and Sunday at 2 p.m. Tickets are $28 to $50. Tickets and information: (203) 562-5666.

Christopher Plummer remembers being mesmerized as a young man by John Barrymore, both as an actor and as a larger-than-life personality, full of dash, daring and drink.

Plummer, who turns 69 next month, is now on tour playing The Great Profile in "Barrymore," a bravura role that earned him his second Tony award on Broadway. The production runs for one week, beginning Tuesday, at the Shubert Performing Arts Center in New Haven, a theater where Barrymore played some of his greatest roles, including his celebrated performance as Hamlet in 1923.

"He was such a rebellious and ribald creature that he appealed greatly to me," said Plummer in a telephone interview from Chicago, where the show was recently on the road. "His wildness and self- mockery made an instant impact when I was young."

Set in 1942, the William Luce play, directed by Gene Saks, takes place during one evening on the stage of New York's Plymouth Theater as Barrymore attempts to re-create his legendary performance as Shakespeare's Richard III, with the help of an unseen prompter. As the evening progresses, he examines the highs and lows of his illustrious, chaotic and colorful life. His talent may be diminished by time and alcohol, but he has not lost his caustic wit, his appetite for life and his passion for his art.

Barrymore died at age 60 in 1942 as a result of his alcoholism.

As Barrymore says in the play's first act: "Get this straight. I've had a hell of a life for a man who's been dead 15 years."

John Barrymore is now remembered primarily by his screen roles of the '20s and '30s (in such movies as "Twentieth Century," "Bill of Divorcement," "Grand Hotel" and "Counsellor-at-Law"), by his acting- family dynasty (which trickles down to Drew Barrymore) and especially by his reputation as a hard-drinking, good-time womanizer and bon vivant.

Few alive remember what he was like on stage in his prime in the '20s, when his performances were a sensation. These were microphone- less performances that could project magnificence to the last row of the Shubert's second balcony. He was an actor who bridged the fiery melodramatics of the 19th century with the realistic style of the modern era. Barrymore was also a matinee idol in an era where actors had the fan impact of today's rock stars.

Toward the end of his life, Barrymore's talents grew sloppy and he became a caricature of himself, "this hammy creature," according to Plummer. Barrymore at this stage was an actor who became dependent on cue cards, diversions and drink. His decline to clown prince, full of wry and rye, is all the more sad, even tragic, because of the actor's self-awareness of his fall from grace.

But Barrymore's earlier performances, captured on film, show a different, charismatic and vital man.

"The early talkies such as `Counsellor-at-Law' give more evidence of what he might have been like on stage," says Plummer. "He shows a great deal of speed and urgency."

Could an actor like Barrymore be tolerated by the show business of today?

"I don't think so," says Plummer. "The business is, sadly, too huge now. There's too much money at stake. The business is run by people who wouldn't have indulged him. I think Hollywood has lost its sense of humor."

Plummer says actors now have to harbor their madness.

"And the great actors all have a bit of madness to them," says Plummer. "To tame the madness is a particular '90s conceit. It's such a dull decade. It's so self-righteous."

And how about Plummer's own madness?

"I married very happily in 1970 to a marvelous lady {Elaine Taylor} and she saved my life," he says. "She brought me some sanity and some discipline. I was a rebel before that -- or I tried to be. Like Barrymore, I loved irreverence and deviltry. It supplies you sometimes with a big temper and anger that you need for those great roles."

Plummer, whose home is in western Connecticut, certainly has had those during his professional career, which began 48 years ago with "The Rivals" and continued through a wide range of classical parts, including Hamlet, Iago, Richard III, Macbeth, Henry V, Oedipus, Mark Antony (in the inaugural season at the American Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford) and Cyrano (his first Tony award in the musical, which also featured Mark Lamos as Christian).

As for "Barrymore," the role is perhaps the closest to him of all those in his career.

"He and I kind of meet during the evening," says Plummer. "I don't think we're two different creatures. We're a little bit similar in personality and even looks. I feel great empathy toward him."

His greatest tribute came from Elaine Barrymore, the great actor's widow, who came to see the show when it was on Broadway.

"She said, `You two fellows would have gotten along very well.' "

[Illustration] PHOTO: (color), CYLLA VON TIEDEMANN; Caption: CHRISTOPHER PLUMMER will portray actor John Barrymore in William Luce's "Barrymore" at the Shubert Performing Arts Center in New Haven Tuesday through Nov. 22.

Christopher Plummer's one-man tour de force "Barrymore" at the Auditorium Theatre is unquestionably the finest piece of acting Denver has seen for some time, encased in an insightful play written by William Luce and directed by Gene Saks.

If you appreciate good theater and want to see what it takes to win a Tony Award (1997), Drama Desk Award and Outer Critics Circle Award for "Best Actor in a Play," treat yourself with this. Don't be surprised if your expectations for all theater is raised a notch.

A lot of people may only know Plummer for some of his popular motion-picture roles, which is unfortunate. The couple behind me at the show argued whether or not he had appeared in "South Pacific" before reading in the program he had starred in "Sound of Music." But Plummer was recognized as an acting talent, especially in Shakespearean roles, before he ever appeared on the screen.

Plummer's John Barrymore is an entertaining and egotistical drunken sot who alternatively is comedic and bitingly introspective. The combination takes you from laughter to anguish and back. Luce sets the play in the last year of Barrymore's life, 1942. He is a has-been and knows it, but remembers what he once had. Plummer's Barrymore remarks that old age is when your regrets replace your dreams.

As sort of a farewell to feed his ego, Barrymore has decided to produce and star in a New York production of "Richard III," a role he was famous for. All the action takes place on the empty stage as Plummer's Barrymore tries to rehearse and remember his lines through an alcoholic haze. He is aided by "Frank," the offstage prompter who is only heard.

Throughout the rehearsal Barrymore's mind goes through a series of flashbacks as he recalls his wives, sister Ethel, brother Lionel and his father, Maurice. Of his first wife, Kathryn, he says "we were ecstatically happy for 20 years -- and then we met." Of his various marriages, he says each one was like a seven-year rash.

Luce also has thrown in a fairly long scene talking about Barrymore's friendship with a Denver historic figure, newspaperman Gene Fowler. Barrymore teaches profanities to a parrot belonging to Fowler's mother. Barrymore a has a huge, if fragile, ego. At one point he says the biggest regret of his life was that he could never sit in the audience and watch himself perform.

One measure of Plummer's acting ability is how his character fills the empty stage and is able to pull it off in the auditorium without the aid of a microphone. I've seen shows with a half-dozen performers who seemed lost on the same stage. Not so with Plummer.

Only one question remains. It's a mystery why Plummer's performance did not receive a standing ovation on opening night. The same audience applauds wildly when an old car is wheeled out onto the stage for "Sunset Boulevard."

Brad Smith reviews plays for The Denver Business Journal.

William Luce's home in Depoe Bay is full of memorabilia from his play writing career, such as this poster from his 1997 play ''Barrymore,'' about actor John Barrymore (upper left). Christopher Plummer (lower right) won a Tony in the title role. Photo: Brian Davies / The Register-Guard

August 24, 2003

DEPOE BAY - Words are everywhere in William Luce's home. They are splashed on the framed program covers and posters for his plays that line his study's walls. They are emblazoned on a commanding banner trumpeting his play "Baptiste" that towers over the grand piano in his living room. They're contained in the handwritten messages inscribed to him by the many celebrities he has worked with.

"I'm in love with language," Luce says in a measured and mellifluous voice that often drops to almost a whisper. "It's language that appeals to me."

William Luce's home in Depoe Bay is full of memorabilia from his play writing career, such as this poster from his 1997 play ''Barrymore,'' about actor John Barrymore (upper left). Christopher Plummer (lower right) won a Tony in the title role.

Photo: Brian Davies / The Register-Guard

That attraction has led Luce to write dramatic pieces on Emily Dickinson (``The Belle of Amherst''), Isak Dinesen (``Lucifer's Child''), Charlotte Brontė (``Brontė''), Moličre (``Baptiste'') and Lillian Hellman (``Lillian''), among others.

Yet, the congenial Luce became one of America's leading playwrights almost by accident.

Sitting in his well-appointed living room, Luce pulls his stocking feet up on a leather couch as he recalls the day 27 years ago when his life took a sharp turn.

He was in Los Angeles, singing with the Ray Charles Singers. Their main gig was the weekly "Hollywood Palace" television show, where the ensemble did backup for the guest stars.

``It was 2 a.m., and we were doing a pre-record. And it was nothing more than `ooh, ah,' and I thought, `What am I doing here?' It seemed such a waste of time," he recalls.

Fortuitously, the next day Luce was introduced to actor and director Charles Nelson Reilly, who revealed that he and actress Julie Harris wanted to do a play on Emily Dickinson.

Knowing that Luce had written song lyrics (recorded by Doris Day and Jim Nabors), Reilly asked him if he would like to write the script - on spec.

``I said, `I would love to do it. Perhaps I should take a course at UCLA.' Charles said, `Don't be silly. We know more than they do. We'll teach you.' Doesn't that sound like Charles?''

Off Luce went, reading up on Dickinson and putting words down on paper. Over the next three years, he did several versions of the play, going from a multi-character scenario to a one-person vehicle. But he got a shock when the producers read it.

``They said it was very well researched, but it had no humor. It was too literary. They said, `Go back home and try again,' " Luce says. "I was very discouraged. And I went back home and took a nap."

It was the nap of a lifetime.

As Luce recalls, "I dreamed that Julie walked out on stage in a white dress, with flowers in her arms, and she stepped down to the footlights and said to the audience, `Forgive me if I'm frightened. I never see strangers and hardly know what I say.' I woke up. And that became the opening of the play."

"The Belle of Amherst" (originally titled ``Emily''), went on to great Broadway and London success. Harris won her fifth Tony Award as best actress for her portrayal. A recording of the show won a Grammy Award. A PBS production won three Christopher Awards. And a Thames Television production starring Claire Bloom won an International Emmy Award.

All at once, Luce was a famous playwright, moving from project to project. Not bad for a young Portland man who had quit studying piano at Lewis & Clark College and moved to Los Angeles, where he sang with the Norman Luboff Chorus and Johnny Mathis, among others.

Music being his first love, Luce has never veered far from musical projects. He wrote the libretto for the musical theater pieces "My Business Is to Love" (starring Renee Fleming, with Harris and Bloom), "The Divine Orlando" (Western Wind Vocal Ensemble), "Sayonara" and "A Rat's Tale" and for the opera "Gabriel's Daughter," which premiered July 12 at Colorado's Central City Opera, with music by Henry Mollicone.

In a recent turn, Luce resumed studying the piano. He recently played in public for the first time in some 30 years, at the Ernest Bloch Music Festival in Agate Beach.

Luce has been living on the coast for 12 years now, after fleeing a forest fire that threatened his home in the California foothills near Mariposa.

He resides in a trim duplex nestled among trees not far from the ocean. The outside may be unassuming, but the inside is a virtual museum of show business memorabilia.

Luce has done a number of projects with Harris, including "Lucifer's Child," for which she won a Tony nomination, and "Brontė," which won the Peabody Award and Columbia University's Armstrong Award.

He also has written plays on historical figures, including bombastic actor John Barrymore (``Barrymore'') for which Christopher Plummer won a Tony Award as best actor.

Writing and rewriting on his computer, Luce has also penned "Bravo, Caruso!" (Frances de la Tour), "The Last Flapper" (Piper Laurie), "Sound Portrait of William Shakespeare" (David Warner, David Dukes, Peter Donat, Arthur Hill, Joan Hackett, Marian Mercer, Harris) and "Nijinsky" and "Chanel" (for the Parco Center in Tokyo).

He was a Writers Guild Award nominee for his two CBS movies, "The Last Days of Patton" (George C. Scott and Eva Marie Saint) and "The Woman He Loved" (Harris, Jane Seymour, Anthony Andrews, Olivia de Havilland) and co-wrote the CBS movie "Lucy and Desi: Before the Laughter."

Words. Words. Words.

An obsessive bookworm and researcher, Luce has no qualms about playing loose with facts. Unapologetically, he admits he invents things - language, beliefs, encounters - to suit his dramatic purposes.

Asked how he justifies such manipulation, Luce answers by recalling a speaking engagement at a California college where a student quizzed him on the matter.

"I said, `Well, it's been said that a dramatist puts a fact up on stage, then he dreams with it.' And, I said, `I believe in being true to the spirit of the personality, and do not introduce anything into their makeup that is alien and doesn't ring true; but, yes, of course, the dramatist uses his imagination.' "

As an example, Luce says he pointed to his play "Lucifer's Child," in which he has Danish author Isak Dinesen long for yet one more African safari, only this time she would not kill the animals. He invented that part, he says, based on his study of her personality.

"And the student said, `Don't you feel that's dishonest?' And I said, `Well, how do you feel about `Richard III?' Do you like that play?' He said, `Yes.' I said, `It doesn't bother you that Shakespeare turned him into a monster?' `Oh, I see.'

"I said, `If you want the facts - and they are absolutely necessary in biographies and documentaries - then go to library lectures but stay away from the theater, because theater is for the dreaming part.' ''