It isn’t easy keeping up with Jones

Darth VADER is terrified. Well, not Darth Vader, of course, but James Earl Jones. The strapping actor has been iconized as the powerful Prince of Darkness striding through the galaxies in the “Star Wars” franchise. So it’s surprising to see him sitting in his dressing room, blinking behind glasses and speaking softly -- an unprepossessing demeanor that reminds one more of Jones’ performance as the simple-minded Lenny in “Of Mice and Men” than of the other colossi of his resume: The Jack Johnson-like champ in both the stage and film versions of “The Great White Hope,” the tragic Shakespearean heroes Macbeth, Othello and Lear, and of course Troy Maxson, the former baseball player in August Wilson’s domestic epic “Fences,” which won Jones his second Tony in 1987.

“I’m scared right now,” says the 74-year-old Jones, just days before he is to begin previews as the star, with Leslie Uggams, of the revival of Ernest Thompson’s “On Golden Pond” at the Cort Theatre. “You see, when you’re trying to find your way through this strange land that a play can be, then your old tricks don’t work. So, yeah, I’m having problems with him, so much so that it doesn’t even pay to talk about it. I don’t want to depress myself.”

“Him” is Norman Thayer Jr., the bullying 80-year-old curmudgeon at the center of Thompson’s elegy about an old couple coming to terms with mortality -- and family dysfunction -- in a Maine summer house. He was created by Tom Aldredge on Broadway in 1979 and immortalized in the Oscar-winning 1981 film in a valedictory performance by Henry Fonda. That alone might give Jones pause were it not that this revival, directed by Leonard Foglia and also starring Linda Powell as the rebellious daughter, Chelsea, has already had well-received tryout stops at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and in Wilmington, Del. Critics have applauded Jones’ return to the stage after 16 years, with the Washington Post’s Peter Marks leading the charge. “James Earl Jones ignites the stage like something doused in kerosene,” he wrote. “You can’t take your eyes off of him. He remains a force to reckon with.”

Despite the praise, Jones is wary. It’s not that the hiatus from the stage makes him feel rusty. (“I don’t think there are different rules for different media; you’re still trying to be somebody else,” he says.) It’s that he’s still trying to find the right balance between Norman’s irascibility and his vulnerability. “I can’t enjoy compliments,” he says. “I don’t dare. It’s not about compliments. It’s about trying to be as accurate about the character as you can be.”

Foglia says that Jones’ hard-driving integrity has hovered over the company since he enlisted the actor in what morphed from what was to be a concert reading of the play to a full production. The latter depended on Jones’ hectic schedule as the spokesman for Verizon. “He’s the busiest 74-year-old man I know,” says Foglia. “When I first met James Earl Jones, he was firing questions about the character before we even reached the couch in his living room. There are no games. You go right to work.”

Jones did have one startling demand: that he be allowed to play Norman as the bigot he appears to be. At one point in the play, the “old Poop” rhapsodizes to the postman about Maine as a land free of “Jews and Negroes,” implying that the Thayers enjoy their summers there as a way to escape “all that.” Jones also insisted that a white actor be cast as the postman. “Ernest and I were surprised,” says Foglia, “especially since in other productions of the play, that section was often the first to be cut and it had nothing to do with a black playing the part. People are scared of it, they want a ‘kinder, gentler’ play.” The director adds that the actor explained to him that he saw the scene as an expression of black snobbery. In the course of the interview, however, Jones says the exchange is an example of Norman’s snide humor. “He’s not expressing bigotry, he’s expressing his view of Maine in as cynical terms as he is capable of,” says Jones. “The danger is that the audience won’t get the joke, but I don’t think we should be tender-footed about it. If you take it seriously, the problem arises, how could a man who is a professor of English, responsible for young minds, have been a bigot for all those years? He’s not a bigot, he’s a realist. His wife says to him, ‘Oh, you have a tie on.’ And he says, ‘Yes, I know, I put it there.’ Now, only recently was I advised that might be a joke. What I really think is, Norman’s a literalist.”

Jones’ concern with confusing the audience came up as well during preparations for the 1974 production of “Mice and Men,” in the course of which the N-word was used. The actor said he wrote John Steinbeck to ask him what Lenny’s reaction might be to hearing the offending word. “Mr. Steinbeck wrote back, ‘Jim, Lenny wouldn’t know what the word ... meant, so you should go ahead and play it as if color were irrelevant,’ ” recalls Jones.

Playwright Thompson says Jones is effective in pulling off some of the harder edges of Norman’s character because even though he can be imposing -- just watch the audience erupt when Norman ejects somebody occupying his favorite chair -- he is also not afraid to be vulnerable. He’s like Henry Fonda in that regard, says Thompson. “But Henry was frailer, and there’s something even more affecting about a big strong guy playing a man in trouble,” says Thompson. “What’s also magical is that you can picture James Earl Jones in the classroom -- a tough teacher but one who turned out some great students.”

The actor readily admits that the latter quality is important to him. After all, it was a professor, Donald Crouch, whom Jones credits for having turned him from a shy, stuttering 9-year-old living on a Michigan farm with his maternal grandparents into a young man with a talent for reciting poetry. In Arkabatula, Miss., at the height of the Depression, his parents split before he was born, his mother later leaving Jones for weeks at a time in the care of her parents. Jones recalls the Mississippi years as bucolic, but the move north when he was 5 was traumatic. The stutterer was born.

Acting bloodlines

Robert EARL JONES, James’ father, was absent from his son’s life until decades later, when the two reunited. After graduating from the University of Michigan, which he attended on a scholarship, James Earl decided to pursue an acting career In New York City. He lived at times with his father, himself an actor, in a cold-water flat, and they even worked together as janitors as they waited for roles, which were few and far between. But the wounds were too deep for any real reconciliation between father and son. “Robert Earl wanted the status of being my father, but I couldn’t give him that,” the actor has said. The breakthrough for the younger Jones came in the early ‘60s in an acclaimed production of Jean Genet’s “The Blacks,” which also launched the careers of Billy Dee Williams, Louis Gossett Jr., Maya Angelou and Cicely Tyson.

Jones, however, is not one to dwell on the strides that African American actors have made since then. He thinks it’s insignificant that Oscar-winner Denzel Washington is on Broadway playing Brutus in a multiracial “Julius Caesar” or that Jamie Foxx took home the Oscar for “Ray” in February. “I’m not quite sure what makes this so fascinating to people,” he says. “I don’t think it’s any more remarkable than if there were suddenly more opportunities for women.”

He thinks that the continuous harping on racial differences simply reinforces racism as something “normal” rather than the mutant virus it is. “We’re so fed on it that we’ve made it our diet, an addiction, a drug that we have a hard time dumping and have no clue as to ending. Acknowledging it as anything less than insanity is offensive to mankind and to God.”

Jones would rather talk about the crux of “On Golden Pond,” the bitter alienation between Norman and his daughter, emotional terrain that he has mined before, most notably in “Fences” and, of course, “King Lear.” Though he says he works off the printed page of the script -- “I should get in touch with Norman’s fear and angers, not mine” -- his own scarred emotional background cannot help coming into play, at least when it comes to understanding Norman’s rage as a cover for the fears that afflict all men.

“You know, it’s really about the failures of the father, which are universal,” he adds, recalling the tremendous emotional conflicts during the rehearsals of “Fences,” which dealt with the explosive relationship between Troy and his rebellious son. “We were struggling for a resolution at the time in the play,” he recalls. “And I would come home from rehearsals and look at my infant son and say to myself, ‘Does it really have to come to this, to the destruction of two people?’ And on the day we reached that resolution, when Troy wrestles with his son for the baseball bat and is poised to beat his brains out but can’t, I was able to stand by my son’s bed and say, ‘No, it doesn’t have to come to this.’ But the son must emerge from the father’s identity, just as I had to from my father’s, and though it need not be tragic, it is always, always painful. And the father always loses.”

A promising start

Judging by the audience’s response to the first preview, Jones’ fears of not finding Norman appear to have been unfounded. The play is much funnier than one remembers, many of the laughs fueled by Jones’ lumbering lion in winter, licking his chops as fresh blood comes into view in the persons of Chelsea’s boyfriend and his young son.

There is both mischief and sadness in Norman’s dyspepsia and diminishing powers, calling to mind Dylan Thomas’ famous advice to his father to “not go gentle into that good night....Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

“That poem is the coda of this play, this play is about that poem,” says Jones the following morning. “I suppose if a person is happy and content, you can go quietly, but most of us are not, most of us like living and hang on to it, fiercely. It doesn’t mean that you have to howl like Lear, but I do not think you have to resign yourself to being a complete bust at the end. I think it’s about being as creative and alive in our old age as we were in our youth. Maybe even more so.”

And indeed, while the curmudgeonly tyrant is there in Jones’ performance, there is also a trait that is new to the character of Norman: the little boy. As he lopes across the stage, sulks in a corner, tries on various fishing hats, it isn’t hard to imagine that Norman’s rage at turning 80 is in no small measure because he feels 8.

Uggams corroborates that this is as true about Jones offstage as it is on.

“He is a teddy bear, who loves it even more when you’re acting silly than when you’re acting serious,” she says. “You can make him laugh in a minute.”

When Jones hears this characterization, the laughs start to rumble across the phone line.

“Yes, people think of me that way,” he says.

There is a pause. And then he laughs again.