She’s in L.A., Not Hollywood

Cherry Jones arrives for an interview just like one would expect her to: on a bicycle, her straight brown hair tucked under a helmet, her tall, athletic body attired in beige summer shorts and vest.

The intensely blue-eyed Southerner may have received the most rapturous reviews of the 1994-1995 season for playing the meek yet defiant Catherine Sloper in the hit Lincoln Center Theater revival of Ruth and Augustus Goetz’s well-worn 1947 drama “The Heiress.” And she may have won all the awards that year, including the Tony for best actress. But even at that time she was determined, amid all the hoopla, to preserve her modest lifestyle--sneaking out the stage door to hop on her bike, leaving the crowds to think she was “some lighting person or other,” as she liked to put it.

Eighteen months later, as director Gerald Gutierrez prepares to open his elegant production at the Ahmanson Theatre on Wednesday, Jones is happy to reclaim her place as a journeywoman actress and primo storyteller, coming as she does from a long line of Tennessee talkers. And, indeed, she does seem to be as homespun and down-to-earth as the place she has chosen for the interview, a funky coffeehouse with wobbly tables and worn, overstuffed couches near the Greenwich Village studio apartment she shares with her lover, architect Mary O’Connor.

In his rave review for “The Heiress,” New York Times critic Vincent Canby called Jones “a splendid young actress who’s new to me”--despite the fact that the 39-year-old veteran of the theater already had by that time more than 50 productions under her belt, including a 1991 Tony nomination for “Our Country’s Good” and a 1992 Obie award for “The Baltimore Waltz.”

“It really was the mildest sort of fame, but it was still kind of overwhelming because I’d never had that kind of attention before,” she says, ordering a caffe latte and a chef’s salad.

Since “The Heiress” ended its run earlier this year, Jones has appeared as Hannah Jelkes in the revival of Tennessee Williams’ “The Night of the Iguana” on Broadway and has just finished filming a featured role in “The Tears of Julian Poe,” in which she plays the mute guardian of the lead character, portrayed by Christian Slater. She was reprising her role in “Iguana,” which she’d played three years before at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, and she found that experience helpful as she prepares to return to “The Heiress.”

“It’s a lot harder to re-create than to create a role,” says Jones, betraying trepidation at expectations surrounding the Los Angeles engagement. “The initial experience is like a love affair, the adrenaline is going. Now, the mystery that feeds you in the rehearsal process is absent, but I hope that we can make it even better, find even more to plumb for Los Angeles. For one, we have Donald Moffat playing Dr. Austin Sloper and he has such integrity and truth that it will anchor the production and force us all to be there in the moment. And then there is the infamous Gerry Gutierrez riding herd over all of us so that we don’t turn in a performance from August 1995.”

Not that the performances then were ever just chopped liver. Even five months into the run, one could hear a pin drop at the Cort Theatre as audiences collectively leaned forward to watch the painfully shy, plain Catherine become torn between two men: her adored father, the stern yet socially committed Dr. Sloper, who resents his bumbling daughter for being responsible for his wife’s death in childbirth; and her one and only suitor, the charming and manipulative Morris Townsend, who has one eye trained on his quarry’s breathlessly expectant face and the other on her purse.

The success of “The Heiress” took nearly everyone by surprise when it opened with Jones, Philip Bosco, Jon Tenney and Frances Sternhagen in the cast, because the story was so familiar to any aficionado of literature or late-night TV. The Goetzes based their play on “Washington Square,” the 1880 Henry James novel of mind games played amid the gas-lit era of drawing room chatter and the clopping carriage horses of the American aristocracy. But it was the 1949 William Wyler movie, starring Olivia de Havilland, that brought the delicious muscular tale of male tyranny and a woman’s revenge to the masses. Who would’ve guessed that a 1947 play based on an 1880 novel about the genteel New York society of the 1850s would have so captivated a 1990s audience?

“I think we can thank the artists who have the skill to make these stories come alive for us,” says Jones, crediting director Gutierrez. “They know how to invigorate the tales so that it’s not some dreadful, stiff idea of what life was like back then. We can feel our own flesh in those petticoats and starched collars.”

As the tongue-tied heiress, Jones is the churning center of that incarnation, but through sheer presence more than words. Her Catherine Sloper holds attention with very few lines and that points to one of the actress’ greatest assets: the seasoned ability to be on the stage, purely and simply.

“There’s a stillness to Cherry Jones that most actors don’t have and an absolute command of the stage,” says Robert Falls, who directed her in “Iguana” in Chicago and New York. “There’s a kind of spiritual center to her work and to her life.”

“She has a radiant vulnerability and strength,” says Andre Bishop, artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater, who along with Gutierrez and casting agent Daniel Swee was responsible for giving her the role in “The Heiress.”

“There’s something buoyant and positive about Cherry which allows the impulse of the play to be about a woman who discovers a strength that has always been there--as opposed to the way Catherine is usually played, as some mousy, victimized pathetic thing who becomes Medea at the end,” Bishop says.

Yet while Jones’ Catherine Sloper may have a deep spiritual strength, she is also a woman of raw emotion and sexual hunger. In one scene, she interrupts her young lover’s leave-taking with a passionate embrace that threatens to pop the bones of her corset.

“Gerry [Gutierrez] really wants me to rape him at that moment,” says Jones, reddening a bit. “What I did was try to make it a little bit more feminine. I think, in my heart, that it rather borders on Hollywood, not necessarily true to the period or to Catherine’s experience, but it makes for damn good theater.”

Making “damn good theater” was a vocation to which Jones was called rather early in her life, growing up in the small town of Paris, Tenn., the eldest of two girls born to a florist and his wife, a teacher of English literature. By the age of 4, Jones was already a little drama queen. Whenever disciplined, she recalls, she’d run into the lobby of the seedy hotel across the street, screaming, “She’s going to kill me! She’s going to kill me!,” until her poor mother came to retrieve her.

“My mother said I was rather uncontrollable until my younger sister came along, and that she had to figure a way to tame me without breaking my spirit,” recalls Jones, describing herself as a “Southern mutt” of English, Irish, Scotch, Huguenot and Native American extraction. “I guess she succeeded.”

With an admonition from her mother never “to confuse your professional success or failure with your self-worth,” Jones was free to indulge her fantasies, creating amateur theatricals in a basement theater and taking up trumpet and drums in the school band. Her iconoclasm stemmed in part from the certainty that she was gay--”I spent hours counting the freckles on Julie Andrews’ face on the back album cover for ‘The Sound of Music’ “--though the unconditional love she felt from her family meant that her coming out was far less traumatic for her than for others.

Her feisty maternal grandmother, Thelma Cherry, encouraged Jones to pursue an acting career along with the local drama teacher, Ruby Crider, who saw to it that Jones got into Carnegie-Mellon in Pittsburgh. In accepting her Tony award, Jones thanked these two women--and her idol, Colleen Dewhurst. At age 16, she had seen the veteran actress in Chicago, in “A Moon for the Misbegotten,” and the experience changed her life.

“When I saw Colleen Dewhurst, I understood the power of bringing the audience to the teller of the story so that it becomes incredibly intimate rather than grasping for them,” she says. “I knew I wanted to be an actress but after seeing her, I realized I could be a powerful, strong woman who acted.”

After graduating from Carnegie-Mellon, Jones found a berth in the American Repertory Theatre’s first season in 1980 in Cambridge, Mass., as Rosalind in “As You Like It.” The appearance began an association with regional theater, allowing her to work with such directors as Andrei Serban, Michael Greif, Robert Falls and Anne Bogart.

Though she appeared on Broadway in Tommy Tune’s “Stepping Out” and as Lady Macduff in the Christopher Plummer-Glenda Jackson production of “Macbeth,” her first big break came as the toughened and much abused ex-convict Liz Morden in Timberlake Wertenbaker’s “Our Country’s Good” on Broadway. With her short-cropped hair, ragged dress and smudged features, she stood defiant and proud, even as a hangman measured her for a noose. “I love playing any character whose strength, whose fearsomeness, comes from such a still place, like a lioness waiting to spring,” she says. “The power no longer resides in powder and curls but in the depth and stillness of one’s being.”

To many of her friends, Jones seems to negotiate her talent effortlessly. “She seems to have this incredible well of truth to draw on,” says friend and actress Hope Davis. But Jones hints obliquely that it comes at a steep price. Without going into details, she says that about four years ago, while drinking quite heavily, she went into a severe clinical depression.

“I was paranoid, joyless, dead inside,” she recalls. “I had nothing to give anyone. I gave up drinking and it actually became worse. I suppose it had to do with some personal flaws that I couldn’t come to terms with. I’d lost some self-worth.”

She found solace first in her work, and then this past summer, while filming “The Tears of Julian Poe” in the Catskills, she had a lot of time off, which she spent by a rushing trout stream, writing letters, skipping stones, swimming and just letting her imagination run riot.

“I now feel a kind of peace that I haven’t felt since I was 12 when I rejected the church out of an adolescent anger that they could never embrace me because of my homosexuality,” she says. “I’m no longer an agnostic. I think I’ve finally learned that there is a transforming and redemptive energy in this world, not organized in any religious way, and not within the routine of nature, but something greater and larger than that.”

A committed theater actress, Jones has yet to see films as anything more than a rather frustrating way to supplement her income. “I suppose my bitterness about Hollywood comes from having lost so many of my friends to Los Angeles,” she says. “Still, I’ve rarely known an actor who’s moved there to achieve a higher level of artistry. It’s about fame and fortune and with fame and fortune comes a tremendous amount of compromise. I hope I can enter and exit through the back door, just nice, small, manageable character parts. Nothing is worth the loss of personal anonymity. I’m fascinated by film but there are many brilliant women honing their craft in the movies. They don’t need me.”

After the run of “The Heiress,” Jones says, she is scheduled to star in a new play by Tina Howe, “Pride’s Crossing,” directed by San Diego Old Globe Artistic Director Jack O’Brien, in which she will play a 91-year-old who looks back over her adventurous life. The show is scheduled to open Jan. 30 at the Old Globe.

Asked if she needs to find something redemptive or hopeful in the roles she chooses to play, Jones answers thoughtfully, “not hope, but literature. I am hopeful for Catherine, but all conflict in drama and literature comes from the pettiness and smallness of the human spirit.

“During the [New York] run of ‘The Heiress,’ I received so many letters, especially from young girls who felt they had disappointed their parents--their fathers--who are trying to find love, never having known it themselves. So when I’m playing Catherine, in her desolation and utter abandonment, I realize that there is a handful of people in the audience in this exact position, whose real human pain I am representing. It is heartbreaking and devastating to realize that. But what great literature and drama teach us is that, at the least, we are not alone.”

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“The Heiress,” Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave. Opens Wednesday. Regular schedule: Tuesdays to Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays to Sundays, 2 p.m. Also next Sunday, Sept. 22 and 29 and Oct. 6, 7:30 p.m.; Oct. 10, 17 and 24, 2 p.m. Ends Oct. 27. $15-$52.50. (213) 628-2772.