Cherry Jones is either a disarming, self-effacing woman with an easy smile and a warm, down-home charm, or she’s a dark and fearsome dreadnought, a monolith of cold, congealed, righteous wrath.
The difference lies in whether she’s herself, the 50-year-old, two-time Tony award-winning actress from Paris, Tenn., or Sister Aloysius, principal of a Catholic school in the Bronx in 1964 in John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer-winning play, “Doubt.”
The transformation of Jones to Aloysius (with just seven performances left at the LaSalle Bank Theatre starting with Wednesday’s matinee) is one of the great feats of stagecraft of recent seasons. Critics and fellow actors compare this actress, heralded by theater buffs but relatively unknown beyond that circle, to such great ladies of the American theater as Helen Hayes. A 2004 Tribune review of the play called her “an American actress for the ages.”
On a recent afternoon, though, Jones was curled, barefoot, into the couch of her hotel room 5 1/2 hours before she would don her habit and mesmerize yet another audience. She talked about becoming Aloysius.
“It’s not with makeup. I put on makeup after the play,” she said, “a little eyeliner and some lipstick. My Aunt Carmen used to say, ‘Feel a little dead, put on a little red.’ “
Onstage, only an oval of face and a glint of spectacles show above a black capelet — which usually hides her hands — and below a bonnet.
“Look, I’ll show you something,” she said, lifting up an end-table lamp to put more light on her neck. “That’s a permanent line left there from the — I almost said the f-word — ribbon of the bonnet that I tie so tightly. That’s to really pop the double chins. It also becomes sort of a ledge for me to peer down from. And, yes, I have been known to use the f-word. I’m a stage actress after all.”
She envisions Sister Aloysius as being a dozen or so years older than she. The nun’s glasses are bifocals, the old-fashioned, half-moon insets made to Jones’ prescription, forcing a certain stiffness in the way she looks at the three other actors in the play.
“They’re held on by a homemade athletic band so that they will never slip down on my nose,” she said. “The point is to never touch those glasses. I want her palette to be as spare as possible; she’s more severe, more the monolith, that way.”
Jones also decided that Aloysius would have osteoporosis.
“Her bones are paper thin,” she said, “a fragile shell that just emphasizes her will. I wanted her to look physically affected by her life.”
The play mentions that Aloysius came to the sisterhood later in life, after she was widowed during wartime, but there’s no mention of details that live only in the fullness of Jones’ imagination.
Created back story
“The osteoporosis,” she said in the way someone might remark about a friend, “is the result of a hysterectomy performed when she was 24.”
The voice of Sister Aloysius is the third component of Jones’ award-winning performance.
“I wanted her voice to be unappealing, grating” she said, “putting audiences in a cold sweat who had hard, unpleasant nuns 40 years earlier. I heard Mother Theresa speak on a television interview and, on that occasion at least, her voice was like an Albanian truck driver, harsh and crude, not at all that of a saint but of someone who had spent a lifetime ordering people around and saving thousands in the process. That’s Aloysius’ voice.”
Playwright John Shanley “wanted the characters to sound like local people from the Bronx. . . . Chris [McGarry, who plays Father Flynn] is basically doing Shanley,” Jones said. “My accent is all over the place, so I decided that she grew up in Boston and moved to the Bronx and had spent summers with an aunt in Alabama. When you’re creating a role, it can be osteoporosis, Alabama, whatever.”
The actress, who is 5 feet 8 1/2 inches tall, said she’s starting to hunch over in real life (after about 565 performances with a long road ahead, as the tour, which leaves Chicago after Jan. 28, has been extended through May 20). “That’s the one thing about her that lingers after I leave the stage. I think I’ll need to do yoga.”
On its surface, “Doubt” is about the nun’s rock-hard certainty that Father Flynn is taking sexual liberties with a new boy in the school. She has nothing that would pass for proof, but she knows the students, knows the world beyond the church and knows most of all that she will fight to the death — against one of the most dominant male hierarchies of the time — to protect those children. In modern idiom, she will take him down.
For many audiences, that’s enough. People leave the theater convinced either that Flynn is guilty or that Aloysius is intent on destroying an innocent man.
“And both camps,” Jones said, “are blown away when they find out that others don’t see it the way they do. They think it’s so obvious.
“I’ve found there are two demographics that I absolutely know how they will react. Older Jewish people will say, `He’s innocent, and she’s Joe McCarthy, and it’s a witch hunt;’ and mothers of young children will say, `No matter what, she did the right thing.’ For those mothers, protecting children is all that matters.”
But “Doubt” is more interested in the question than in any answer. The play can live in a far broader context. On www.doubtthetour.com, playwright Shanley explains:
Confrontational times
“There’s a symptom apparent in America right now. It’s evident in political talk shows, in entertainment coverage, in artistic criticism of every kind, in religious discussion. . . . We are living in a culture of extreme advocacy, of confrontation, of judgment and of verdict. Discussion has given way to debate. Communication has become a contest of wills. . . .
“Let me ask you. Have you ever held a position in an argument past the point of comfort? Have you ever defended a way of life you were on the verge of exhausting? Have you ever given service to a creed you no longer utterly believed? Have you ever told a girl you loved her and felt the faint nausea of eroding conviction? I have. That’s an interesting moment. For a playwright, it’s the beginning of an idea. I saw a piece of real estate on which I might build a play, a play that sat on something silent in my life and in my time. I started with a title: Doubt.”
Long before Sister Aloysius, there was Cherry Jones (her first name taken from her grandfather’s last), growing up Methodist in Paris, population 10,000, in western Tennessee. Her father was a florist. Her mother taught English to 1st graders. When she was 8, they took her to a production of “The Country Girl.” At the end of the play, the lights went out; but, for just a second, a tiny spot hit the actress who starred in the show.
Jones still remembers the moment: “It was as though her soul was glowing in the dark. I thought, `I want to do that.'”
In the late ’60s, at the height of the Vietnam War, Jones lost her faith and never really found it again. She envies those who are guided by strong belief, but as for her, “I just don’t know, and I don’t know how anyone can.”
She also realized that there was something about her that would not play well in that place and time. She was gay.
Jones has never kept that secret in her career. She mentioned her then-partner, architect Mary O’Connor, when she accepted her first Tony in 1995 and acknowledged her current partner, Sarah Paulson (Harriet on “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip”), when she won again in 2005. But, for quite a while there was an unspoken agreement not to talk about it back home.
In a Washington Post interview last year, Jones said, “Mother was prepared to share me with another man, but she was not prepared to share me with another woman. . . . She grieved for me as though she had been told her child had an incurable disease.”
Mother changes view
In that interview, she said that more recently her mother has said she has become intellectually all right with it, if not so much emotionally. As for Paris, Tenn., “there was a New York Times piece on me a while back, and after that came out, there were lots of letters to the local paper citing Leviticus, but that’s changed. I go back a couple of times each year. I was grand marshal for the parade in the major event of the town, the annual World’s Biggest Fish Fry.” (Tennessee River catfish, all you can eat, $10.)
Before she returns home again, there’s more Aloysius to be.
“I find myself defending her all the time. She’s not just this block of granite,” Jones said.
“If I were in the audience, I would walk away with doubt, but I know the play from deeply inside her. I see the noble, serving part of the woman. On nights when I sense the audience just hates her guts, I’ll tweak the reading of the end of a line a little to open a door to her heart just a crack.
“At one performance, at the very end, just as the lights went off, a woman in the audience said, `May she burn in hell.’ Well, I’ll tell you something about Sister Aloysius. I adore her.”
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cleroux@tribune.com
