The Theatrical Moment

By MICHAEL PHILLIPS

Dec. 28, 1999 12 AM PT

TIMES THEATER CRITIC

Cherry Jones can’t wait to get into Rehearsal Room Two at the Manhattan Theatre Club, get in there and have at it.

What’s “it”? In the Clara Bow star-quality sense, “it” is a mixture of sparkle and idiosyncrasy and strength. Jones has that, and it’s what makes the anticipation of her latest stage creation something to savor.

In this case, though, “it” happens to be a Broadway revival (preceded by a Chicago Goodman Theatre edition) of Eugene O’Neill’s “A Moon for the Misbegotten,” co-starring Gabriel Byrne. Directed by Daniel Sullivan, the production opens in Chicago on Jan. 24 for a one-month run, then opens on Broadway on March 19 for a limited engagement. At the moment, Jones also can be seen onscreen as Hallie Flanagan, the head of the Depression-era Federal Theatre Project, in “Cradle Will Rock.”

Los Angeles theatergoers are most familiar with the 43-year-old native of Paris, Tenn., through her 1996 Ahmanson Theatre engagement in “The Heiress,” for which she won a Tony Award a year earlier. She returned to L.A. a year ago for the Mark Taper Forum production of “Tongue of a Bird.”

A day before the first “Moon for the Misbegotten” rehearsal, she spoke by phone from the apartment she shares with her longtime partner, architect Mary O’Connor.

Question: You’ve cited Colleen Dewhurst in “Moon for the Misbegotten,” which you saw when you were 16, as a seminal influence on your career. Is there any particular process you go through to get a performance out of your head before you begin work on a role yourself?

Answer: I never wanted to go near this role, because of that; I couldn’t imagine getting it out of my mind. She had died a couple of years before I did Josie in Baltimore 1/8a 1993 production, directed by Lisa Peterson 3/8. When I started work on it there, though, I realized we were completely different in the role. She’s more the Mother Earth woman, and I’m sort of . . . the Child-Woman, I suppose.

What I’m left with now is just the feeling and the aura of what 1/8Dewhurst 3/8 gave us. In Baltimore one night, I looked up at our imaginary moon, in that gorgeous period between midnight and dawn in the play, I looked up and the face I saw in the moon was hers. It stayed with me every night after that. . . . It was so wonderful to see that broad smile of hers and that wink on nights it was going well and the encouragement on nights it wasn’t.

Q: A few years ago, you said that at 33, you could finally hang out your shingle as an actor. You said it was because you had finally achieved “simplicity and focus and the ability to be in the moment, and the technique to pull it off.” Is that the trick to connecting honestly to a role?

A: Yes, I think it is. It just takes concentration and simplicity and not worrying about the result. I know that as a younger performer, I always had an idea in my head about what I needed to accomplish in a role.

I was always chasing this impossible goal in my head and never being fully free. And I think a lot of young performers have to overcome that. Except for the extremely gifted ones, the genius ones, who somehow avoid it from the get-go. So once I was able to be where I needed to be, and be right there, it was a lot more fun.

Q: Let’s talk about the kind of career Judi Dench and quite a few others in England have enjoyed, a career that has always been easier in England--one where you travel easily among the stage and film and television.

A: Certainly in the ‘70s and ‘80s, people who’d go off to Hollywood were often gone for good, Meryl Streep being the classic example. She left the stage and she hasn’t returned to it, essentially. I keep dreaming of the day she will, and I believe that she will, because she is a genius performer and “performer” is the key word there. She loves an audience; she’s like a sorceress when she’s in front of a crowd.

But I think it’s so difficult once you get caught up in that world--I’m not talking about Streep now, I’m talking about a lot of my friends who’ve gone out there--it’s hard to return to the stage. But I think it’s happening more and more now. It’s easier in England; England’s smaller. Everything’s right in London.

Q: Compared to 20 years ago, when you were coming up, do you think it’s a better or worse time to get a foothold in the American theater?

A: I think it’s difficult for kids right now. I went to Carnegie-Mellon University, graduated, came to New York, scooped ice cream, got into the Brooklyn Academy of Music Theater, which led to the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass. By the time I got to ART I was 23; I went to play Rosalind in “As You Like It.”

A lot of these theaters now, they all have training programs where kids get a master’s degree or the equivalent. But they’re graduating at 27 or 28 with incredible debt. These kids come out of these schools with wonderful educations, but unless they’re independently wealthy, they’re $75,000 in debt! Now, there’s no way they’re going to pay that off in the theater. They’re only going to pay that off if they get lucky and get a sitcom in Hollywood.

In a way these programs are shooting themselves in the foot. But then, it’s always been a Catch-22 for young performers. How do you get a job? Through an agent. How do you get an agent? You have to have a job. Each generation has to find its own way into the business, because it changes constantly.

Q: What about the audiences in New York versus the audiences in L.A., or in Chicago, where you’re about to work again?

A: Well, it’s funny. The audiences in Los Angeles have this kind of . . . bawdy innocence.

Chicago audiences, I have to say, having only played there twice, I love. They’re easy, they’re attentive, they want to be there. We did “Night of the Iguana” there before we did it in New York. It was a much stronger production in Chicago, for a number of very mercurial reasons--the way the set fit in the house, things like that.

But the audiences in Chicago were in the aisles for the first act, which was just where we wanted them. Just roaring with laughter. And then in the second act, during that pas de deux between Shannon and Hannah, you could hear a pin drop. It was a kind of attentiveness that you don’t always feel in a New York house, and you don’t always feel in an L.A. house.

Q: Hallie Flanagan, whom you played in “Cradle Will Rock,” said she wanted to help foster a national theater that was “a part of, and not apart from, everyday existence.” Thirty years later the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and a few other key agencies put the seed money into place in the 1960s. Now we have the resident theater movement. Is it what Flanagan had in mind?

A: It sure is, although she would’ve wanted the government to be more active in the funding of it. The NEA has been always been small, and now it’s a trickle, it’s almost nonexistent.

From my limited exposure to the boardrooms of regional theaters, it’s the corporations and individuals who’ve taken up the slack for the government. But you wonder what in the world is going to happen with the next economy meltdown. Are all these theaters that are hanging in there going to wither on the vine?

Here we are, the greatest democracy in the world, and you’d think we would be comfortable with the idea of not only celebrating but funding our art and developing a culture that draws on all these different peoples in this land.

Art helps us understand who we are. I think we’ll start realizing that. We’ll start turning more and more to the arts, because people are getting so far inside their computers, they’re going to realize they need some real flesh and bone up there in front of them. And a community dialogue, which is what theater’s about.

Movies are not about community dialogue. Right now, they’re about nihilism, for the most part. 1/8She laughs. 3/8 The popular entertainment in this country is all about our worst fears, and feeding our paranoia. That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t help us progress. And it just creates a negativity that’s going to do us in. I mean, look what’s happening with our children!

I don’t put the blame on Hollywood, but I just don’t think it’s helping any, you know? All these people, at some point in their careers, thought of themselves as artists, or they at least aspired to something. I know people have trouble with that very word, because “art” means “elitism,” but it really means celebrating the beauty of the human spirit as well as examining the ugliness, so that we can better ourselves.

Q: Your mother once told you never to confuse your professional success or failure with your self-worth. Excellent advice, no?

A: And so few of us can ever attain it! 1/8She laughs. 3/8 You take a battering, whether you’re a plumber or an actor or whatever. But, yes. It was great advice.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

CROSSROADS

This is the third day in a series of interviews, conducted by Calendar critics, with leaders in the arts and entertainment. It continues in daily Calendar through Friday.

Dec. 26

* MUSIC: Tod Machover, MIT media lab and new music composer

Dec. 27

* TELEVISION: Jeff Cohen, founder of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting

* MOVIES: John Lassiter, creative guru at Pixar Animation Studios

Today

* THEATER: Cherry Jones, Tony-winning actress

* FOOD: Alice Waters, owner of Chez Panisse in Berkeley

Wednesday

* POP MUSIC: Tom Morello, Rage Against the Machine guitarist

* DANCE: Judy Mitoma, director, Center for Intercultural Performance, UCLA

Thursday