'Amanda Plummer does not give interviews. Sure, she meets with reporters and answers questions, but this is no ordinary Q&A. This is a performance - a quirky, amusing, occasionally bewildering but wholly intriguing performance. That's not to say that Plummer, currently starring with Scott Glenn in Tracy Letts' Killer Joe at the Soho Playhouse, is insincere. On the contrary, she is entirely genuine - disarmingly so. It's just that anyplace, even the private dining room at a Soho restaurant, becomes an inadvertent stage for someone like Plummer, whose dark eyes and angular, frail-but-tough appearance radiate intensity even in those rare moments when she's sitting still.
Mostly, however, this is an active show: The 42 year old actress slouches and slumps, sliding in her chair before leaning forward intently; she interrupts herself to jump up and grab cigarettes from her coat. Her hands gesticulate constantly, waving, banging the table, or acting as a telescope. Even her voice is constantly on the move: She sounds almost childlike in tone, and her speech is sometimes tinged with a slight Texas accent carried over from the play. There are long pauses and hearty laughs, demure and insecure whispers of sentence fragments, and salty tirades punctuated by giggles as if she's astonished at her own outburst. Her answers are thoughtful, but concrete thoughts can become abstract rambles that stretch until Plummer gets lost in her own verbal meandering.
The daughter of stage stars Christopher Plummer and Tammy Grimes -she lived with her mother from the age of two, after the couple divorced. Plummer had a string of early successes, but has been absent from the New York theater scene since she moved to Los Angeles in 1990. She won an Outer Critics Circle Award and Drama Desk and Tony nominations in 1982 for a A Taste of Honey, followed by the title role in Agnes of God, which brought her Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle, and Tony Awards. But after roles in such movies as The World According to Garp and Daniel, and more Broadway starring roles opposite Jessica Tancy in The Glass Menagerie and another Tony nomination in 1987 for Pygmalion, her career stalled in the late '80's, prompting her West Coast relocation.
"I moved because the plays weren't there for the kind of actor that I was - I wasn't being cast, nor did I think I was castable in any of the things that were being done" she says. Her voice rising, she blasts theatrical producers for what she saw as commercial greed and "so little faith in the intelligence of [theatergoers]."
In California, Plummer's movie career revived, most notably with parts like the shy Lydia in The Fisher King and Honey Bunny- the wannabee robber- in Pulp Fiction, with a few oddballs thrown in like Eunice, a sadistic, homicidal, bisexual ranter in Butterfly Kiss- directed by boyfriend Paul Chart.
But she's "been dying to do theater", and was drawn to Killer Joe- the violent saga of a maladjusted Texas trailer park family besiged by drugs and murder - not so much by her role as by "the piece itself; the way it was written". Pinning her down on specifics, however, is like asking President Clinton to define sexual relations. Plummer thinks. She squirms. She pauses. Finally, she launches into an answer: "When you see something as a whole, whole, whole, the entire thing has to work to create that first impression I got when I read it It doesn't mean that I understood it, it doesn't mean that I identify with it- it was so attractive, and it had so much music to it, and it was the writing, the writing." But stick with her, and Plummer - who plays an evil stepmother- eventually finds her way to a keen insight. Letts' play is "not trying to appease or manipulate the audience; he's not trying to make people react a certain way." Plummer also praises Letts for a lack of sentimentality. "There's a lot of complaining I've noticed in new writing." she says, her voice suddenly sharp with anger. "[Letts] has none of that sour grapes bullshit that has no business on stage."

Plummer claims she has been trying to shed her rust and find a groove on stage. But director Wilson Milam says it's impossible to tell she's been away for so long. Milam has been struck by her 'honesty and commitment', her 'ferocity.' and her 'capacity to startle - she's always surprising but always very real'.
And Letts is impressed at how open the star is to others' ideas. 'I'm sure she has an ego, but you don't see it,' he says. Co-star Marc A Nelson calls Plummer 'one of the hardest working actresses I've ever met - she's really exploring.'
Exploration seems to be central to Plummer's persona. As a child growing up in New York, with chunks of time spent in New Hampshire and Ireland (???), she was always writing, usually poetry, and fantastical stories. She loved horses, even becoming a qualified jockey, but while she never openly announced her ambitions, Plummer loved acting as well. She respects both her parents' stage skills - muttering "Jesus....Jesus" to express her adulation of her father - but has "a desire to be respectfully unlike them."
Plummer has always been excitable. "I have an exaggerated spirit" she says, and she can be "incredibly moved" even by inanimate things. Not surprisingly, she passionately loves opera. "I dance to opera the way you dance to rock", she says, a scenario easily conjured up. "I have an attachment to the absurd, and that keeps me happy," she says, beginning a riff on how she sees the world. Like Keaton or Chaplin, she's fascinated by her physical surroundings. "A person and a table can have such a dialogue that it's incredible, depending on the space that exists between them,", she says, adding that these observations often subconsciously inform her work.
But unlike Chaplin or Keaton, Plummer doesn't see herself attaining superstardom - or even wanting it. "I wouldn't be able to function; I'm a backdoor actor", she says, wandering first into a horse racing analogy and then off the point to her days as a relay runner, when she'd come from behind on the last leg. "I was a catcher upper," she says. She describes the race visually, her hands becoming the runners as she spins around in her chair, growing breathlessly excited as they near the finish line. Pushing yourself "to get that place where you've got got more is the most exciting place", she says.
While her train of though switched tracks, the monologues switched tracks, the monologues reveal another compelling side of Plummer - her perfectionism as an actor. She does push herself, remaining especially vigilant in trying to rid herself of habits - "the older you get the more habits you get," she says. "You have to continually be getting rid of them." When she was younger, she could shake each habit as it developed - "I was neck and neck with them," she says, "but they're nasty little buggers, they're almost separate things."
"The worst thing, of course, is praise - it'll kill ya" she declares, because it reinforces those acting tricks. Still, she's conflicted and contradictory about being a perfectionist. "I don't think it's a good thing to be," she says, because every role is a struggle. But moments later, she says that's what keeps her developing. So ultimately, she's "grateful that I have the inability to feel content."'
STUART MILLER recently profiled adobe theater company for In Theater.