"A tour de force"

“The cast at the Nora Theatre is anchored by a tour de force performance by Paula Plum. Using myriad voices and strikingly varied physicality, she makes the Quija Board Lady, The Seasoned Whore, Minerva the Poetess, and the Chinese Woman who dies childless come alive with passion and profundity. The choices she makes are so strong we are never at a loss as to why these people are driven to unburden the details of their lives and their deaths.”

-Jon Lipsky

"Resonance... well-textured"

“Plum fills Marvin’s Room with resonance… Plum has the gift of two-facedness her well-textured expressions play contrapuntal tunes. A forlorn gaze havers just beyond a loving glance; vacant contentment and aching loneliness seep from the same hangdog look. Comic takes morph into pathos.”

-Skip Ascheim

"Inimitable... riotous performance"

“From the moment the inimitable Paula Plum flounces onto the Lyric Stage, we know we’re in for a treat… Plum’s riotous performance... creates such a marvelous Kath... who is by turns flirtatious, fearful, childish, charming, fussy and fragile... you can’t help but be entertained.”

-Terry Byrne

"Beautifully centered"

“Paula Plum’s hilarious turn as Kath... With her perfectly pitched cockney accent and her lascivious expressions, she’s wonderfully in synch with Orton’s odd, comic perspective. It’s a beautifully centered performance: exaggerated, but rooted in reality. Plum is able to turn this childlike monster into someone pitiable, and, in the play’s closing moments, she become a model of shrewd decorum...”

-Robert Nesti

"Radiant, complex, layered"

“But the most amazing performance comes from Paula Plum ... Plum is radiant as she drags us through both her terror and her tears, and she is transparent as she develops from unwitting victim to willing co-conspirator. Here is a complex, layered performance that will leave you breathless.”

-Terry Byrne

"Truly admirable"

“In a span of two hours Plum shifts gears adeptly from dowdy and weak, to defiant and grief stricken, and finally to cold and hardened. To watch the character muster the wherewithal to admit half-innocently 'My father doesn’t like me,' is to witness the kind of simplicity that great acting is made of. Here... you will see flashes of brilliance, mostly from Ms. Plum; her performance elevated this production from simply competent to truly admirable.”

-Todd Olson

"Commanding, multilayered performance"

"In Shakespeare’s 'Antony and Cleopatra,' a Roman soldier speaks, famously, of the Egyptian queen’s 'infinite variety' as he tries to explain her hold on Marc Antony.

This attribute is likewise possessed, if not to infinite degree then certainly in abundance, by Paula Plum, whose commanding, multilayered performance as Cleopatra is reason enough to see the Actors’ Shakespeare Project’s fine production of 'Antony and Cleopatra.’

In SpeakEasy Stage Company’s 'The Savannah Disputation' in 2009, Plum virtually shrank into the furniture as a mousy, submissive Catholic who was dominated by her strong-willed sister and desperate for the approval of the local priest. Then she followed up last year in SpeakEasy’s 'Body Awareness' with a sensitive portrayal of a woman involved in a long-term relationship with another woman but tempted by a charismatic male photographer who helped her overcome inhibitions about her own body.

It probably goes without saying that Plum’s Cleopatra suffers from no such insecurities or inhibitions — about her sexuality or anything else. While supremely confident in her power to enthrall (grandly extending her hand to a messenger, she notes that it is 'a hand that kings have lipped, and trembled kissing'), this Cleopatra burns not just with sensuality but with smarts. Even when she is not prowling the stage of the renovated Modern Theatre like an out-of-time Maggie the Cat and is simply in languid repose, Plum’s face subtly registers the wheels-within-wheels workings of the queen’s mind.

Her combination of sex appeal and luminous intelligence makes it entirely understandable that Antony would risk his stature and power to remain in her orbit."

-Don Aucoin