Interview: Paula Plum Talks her Process for Playing ELEANOR

It might well be said that actor Paula Plum has never met a role she couldn’t make her own.

A look at her lengthy list of credits – just a few of which are “Romeo and Juliet,” “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “Much Ado About Nothing,” “Macbeth,” “All’s Well That Ends Well,” and “Richard III” with Actors’ Shakespeare Project (ASP), of which she is a founding member, a trio of Elliot Norton Award-winning roles in “Miss Witherspoon” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”  at Lyric Stage Boston and “The Children” at SpeakEasy Stage, and other plays including “Breaking the Code” at Central Square Theater and “Barefoot in the Park” at Gloucester Stage – offer an unneeded reminder of why Plum has long been one of Boston’s most respected stage actors.

Plum may be the winner of numerous IRNE Awards and the 2004 recipient of the Elliot Norton Award for Sustained Excellence, but that doesn’t mean she is ever blasé about any role. Indeed, she was surrounded on her Medford porch by stacks of books about Eleanor Roosevelt as she settled in recently to speak by Zoom about playing the former first lady, global diplomat, and activist in the one-person play “Eleanor,” by playwright Mark St. Germain, at Central Square Theater through October 11.

“Eleanor,” which is set at Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D.C., premiered at Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield in 2020, with Tony Award winner Harriet Sansom Harris (“Thoroughly Modern Millie”) in the starring role. Plum began her research for the part months ago.

“I’ve been dedicating myself to this play since spring. I started memorizing it in May, and my husband and I went to Rock Creek in June to visit ‘Grief,’ the Augustus Saint-Gaudens sculpture where Eleanor sought solace after learning of FDR’s infidelity in 1918. We also went to Eleanor’s Val-Kill cottage, which unfortunately was closed because of National Park Service cutbacks, and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s family home, both in Hyde Park, N.Y., in August,” recalls Plum. “Just getting to tour the Roosevelt Mansion, along the Hudson River, was incredible.”

And the source of keepsakes she carried with her as she studied her lines.

“I’m using a retail version of the script, rather than a working version, which I have covered with stickers of Eleanor’s best-known quotes,” explains Plum. “I also have three- and four-leaf clovers plucked from the lawns at Val-Kill and the Roosevelt Mansion that I keep in a little plastic bag for good juju.”

Luck is just a bonus for the Lynn-born Plum, who trained at Ecole Philippe Gaulier, Paris, and the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts, and is a cum laude graduate of Boston University’s School for the Arts, where she was honored as Distinguished Alumna in 2003.

In addition to her theater career, the actor is also known for her work in films like “Next Stop Wonderland,” “Mermaids,” “Malice,” “Fourth of July,” and 2016’s “Irrational Man,” directed by Woody Allen, and on television in the ABC-TV animated series “Science Court” and Comedy Central’s “Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist.”

Her versatility with voices comes in handy in “Eleanor” when Plum uses her considerable theatrical flair to provide the voices of her uncle, President Theodore Roosevelt, and first cousin, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, her husband FDR and his mother, Sara Roosevelt, FDR’s advisor and cigar-chomping confidante Louis Howe, Winston Churchill, and others.

“Mark St. Germain has very brilliantly created scenes with Eleanor interacting with the others, so I have to switch back and forth between Eleanor and the character in the scene with me,” the actor explains. “At CST, I have an extraordinary dialect coach by the name of Danny Bryck who gives me 15 minutes of notes on tape every day about vowel changes. You’re never completely done, but I believe I have the placement down well. The Roosevelts have a transatlantic dialect, which is very similar to British.”

Plum learned one specific voice as a child listening to her grandmother, but voicing the various characters remains not only a vocal but a physical challenge.

“My grandmother, who lived through World War II and listened to FDR’s fireside chats on a regular basis, would imitate his distinct speaking style. She would say, ‘I hate war, Eleanor hates war, we all hate war.’ When I do Franklin, I’m channeling my grandmother,” says Plum.

“When it comes to Louis Howe, I’m smoking a cigar and sort of gangstering him up a little bit. And for Churchill, of course, I do a British accent. Doing this piece is a real vocal journey, and that involves protecting my voice. It’s challenging and handling the fatigue means drinking a lot of water and humming before and after each performance. If you’re a runner, you stretch your muscles. If you’re a singer, you hum, which is a warm-up and a cool-down,” points out the veteran performer.

Plum estimates she’s done some 10 one-person shows so far in her career. Before signing on for this one, she had a proviso.

“When Central Square offered me this role, I said I will do it if Bryn Boice directs. I’ve done three or four plays, including “Last Night at Bowl-Mor Lanes” at Greater Boston Stage Company, with her. She has a mind like I’ve never experienced, but she also has such a big heart that she understands the emotional journey of the character, too.

“What impresses me most about Bryn, though, is that she always knows what she wants, and I love that. She is a self-assured, strong-minded director. Not that she hasn’t been gently taking care of me, because she has, but she knows exactly what works,” says Plum, a director in her own right, who helmed “Summer, 1976” at CST last fall. “What Bryn and I have is a complete collaboration.”

Plum knows the importance of collaboration, something she’s long had with actor, fellow ASP founding member, and husband Richard Snee. The pair played another president and first lady when they co-starred as Gerald R. and Betty Ford in “She Did All That – Betty Ford: Speaking Out, Saving Lives,” by playwright Lisa Rafferty, at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre in 2016, and will team up again for a one-night-only production of A.R. Gurney’s “Love Letters” on October 22 at Cary Memorial Hall in Lexington.

“Richard is like a psychological comfort pillow for me. He’s taken me through this journey. I couldn’t have done it without him. He runs lines with me every day and his support means everything. He doesn’t give me notes – instead it’s all positive and all about unconditional love,” she says. “As Eleanor says at the end of the play, a true marriage is a partnership between two people who do great things together they could never do alone. That always makes me think of Richard and me, because he is my secret weapon.”

Note: At Saturday matinees, the role of Eleanor Roosevelt is being played by CST Artistic Director Lee Mikeska Gardner.