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| Photo by Lee Christian |
Last night's event was the first of four in the Aero Theatre's Robin Williams retrospective. More information here.
This Thursday, July 9, marked the first of the Aero Theatre’s
four-day retrospective on the life and work of Robin Williams, whose unexpected
death last August greatly saddened fans and non-fans alike. The Aero hosted a
double feature screening of The Fisher King and The World According to
Garp, with special guest Amanda Plummer, a friend and co-star of Robin’s.
During the Q&A, Plummer recounted (and reenacted) a
story about Williams, from a time when she was living in Brooklyn. She had run
into him on the street while he was filming, and he asked to be introduced to
what friends and acquaintances Plummer knew nearby, as he could not stray too
far from the set. She pointed to the emergency exit on the left wing of the
theater and said, “well that’s my grocery store,” and so they went. In the
store, Robin Williams introduced himself to everybody he could, not in a way to
make himself the center of attention, but, she stressed, to truly connect with
these people. This is the man who we have come to know as Robin
Williams, whose glowing eyes illuminated the darkest of shadows, whose smile
cuts through the petty grudges and annoyances of life, and to whose charm
resistance is futile. No matter the character, Robin Williams is energetic,
engaging, and endearing.
Plummer spoke about Robin’s gentleness and selflessness,
and his ability to “go to the depths.” During the filming of The World
According to Garp, “he came up to me, and my hands were lying loosely at my
side, and he brought my arm up, and he ran his finger in the softest, gentlest
way [up my forearm] and I felt so centered by that. [It] was so generous. It
felt good. All of the times I saw him he was always like that, gentle,
thoughtful, caring, and loving, and listening, watching, observing.” She talked about his performance in The Fisher King, how
moving and intense it was when “the glass on the door splits him in two,” a
trick of the camera, “and he goes down and the horse comes, and he goes to that
place, and, of course, I watched it all night, him doing it just ripped your
guts out watching it, but in a beautiful way.” She also talked about the
necessity of feeling vulnerable, “falling is really important, failing is
really important, making mistakes and making a fool of yourself is absolutely
necessary.”
She spoke briefly about his relationship with Jeff
Bridges, which she said was “damned cool,” and her thoughts on working with
Terry Gilliam, whose name aroused a purring sound in her, and she said, “he’s a
lion. He really is a lion on the set…the vibe I got off him was that anything
goes, as long as it’s truthful. Change it up, as long as it’s life.” She talked some about her experience as an young actor,
being forced into a persona by her audience, “you’re face to face with [your
identity] constantly, who [the audience might] think you are, what you are,
what you will be, what you were, and anything that comes into their head…in
everything I’ve done, on stage and on screen, what I attack most is what my
assumptions are. I have to go deep and grapple with them, and then they float
away like they were never there, I have assumptions of the audience, and then
it mirrors back onto me. That’s the work I do as an actor.” She spoke, too, about the importance of a good script,
and about her experiences producing, in Plummer’s opinion, “the best writing is
the kind that floats off the pages, it doesn’t have any gender, there are no
marks, like Ionesco and Chekhov, [the writing] is free fall, so you can jazz
with it. It can be different every night.”
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| Photo by Lee Christian |
Plummer produced a Tennessee Williams play called
Two-Character Play, a name which she was inclined to laugh at, and talked some
about the difficulties of finding an audience for a play that was unpopular,
and her success in creating a production worthy of the script. Towards the end of the Q&A, a woman asked what of
Robin’s death Plummer knew or understood, a question to which she merely
replied, “I have no answers for you." At the end of the Q&A, as the applause drowned out
any audible sound, the words “to Robin” could be read on Plummer’s mouth.
Robin Williams is survived by these two films which
played last night, among many others, several more of which will be screened
throughout the rest of this weekend. His death came like the falling piano in The
World According to Garp: silent until its impact, upon which it produced a
cacophony of musical notes and splintering wood, spurring the cries of grief
and of love. He lives in his performances on screen, two dimensional in space
alone, and in the great beyond which exists in the hands and hearts of the
people whom he so loved, and who so love him.
-By Sintra Martins
-By Sintra Martins