Christopher Plummer was born on December 13, 1929, and years later, on a cold winter night, he made me cry.
In fact, he made me cry a couple of days ago.
And, moreover, making me cry was his expressed intention.
He looked me straight in the eyes and he pulled directly, quite personally really, for my own precious tears. This all took place in Toronto's beautiful Elgin Theatre where Mr. Plummer is currently performing as John Barrymore, a part for which he was awarded a Tony "way back" in 1997.
So, here I am in my mid 40's, creaking, grumbling, lamenting my sore feet on the subway, surrendering myself to the occasional compulsion that I must pluck an errant eyebrow that stubbornly sits high like a schnauzer's whiskers above my wrinkled eyes, and I find myself tearing up with pleasure at the energy I can draw from a man twice my age.
"Why cry at Barrymore", a friend asked? He was perplexed. "How can you watch Bruce Campbell in those Evil Dead movies and not even bat an eye, and then find yourself crying at Barrymore? You're a zombie dude, dude. Man up."
Well...I have my reasons:
I could cry at hearing Shakespeare's prose mixed with the cleverest of Limericks throughout the play. The Bard was always bawdy, and the limericks enhance rather than detract from the deceptively melancholic script.
I could cry at the conceit of the play itself, Mr. Barrymore's predicament, the familiar pathos, the reenactment of those who struggle to put down their gauntlets, to rest, to stop what they've done for so long and so well.
I could cry at the agonies of alcohol, the pain of addictive romance, the targeted spoils of fame, or the equally precise sharp stabs of being forgotten.
For me, though, the tears did not flow until Plummer's character broke from his drunken stupor and burst the boozy ramblings with Hamlet's famous soliloquy.
"What a Piece of Work is Man," he exclaims, owning those lines with a precious delicate mixture of sarcasm, solipsism, and celebration. "How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties..."
And I lost it. Christopher Plummer, for God's sake! Celebrating and decrying the strengths and fallacies of humanity. I've loved poetry since Shel Silvestein. I've loved Shakespeare since I was nine.
I view language as the most powerful of all our inventions.
And because of all this, a man in his 80's can make me weep as I reckon with the relentless nuance, the timeless beauty, the undeniable prowess of words, words, words.
