Gravitational pull

“DID you ever hear Mother Teresa talk?” asks actress Cherry Jones. “She sounded like a Romanian truck driver. A really rough, gravelly voice.”

Jones is talking about creating her superlative-inducing performance in “Doubt,” John Patrick Shanley’s taut, Tony-winning drama that opens Wednesday at the Ahmanson Theatre. In a rare turn for a Tony winner, Jones reprises her role as the formidable Sister Aloysius for the first three stops of the play’s national tour.

“Your first image of a nun is that ramrod-straight posture and a strong, beautiful voice,” she explains. “But that would be too much, too controlling. I wanted Sister Aloysius to be turtle-like. Her bones are brittle and she’s really quite frail. A little Mother Teresa, and a little osteoporosis -- but her spirit is astonishing.”

Not to mention admonishing. West Coast theater audiences will have the suspenseful pleasure of spending 90 rapt minutes in Sister Aloysius’ office at a Bronx Catholic school in 1964. As the school’s iron-willed principal, Aloysius must deal with her growing suspicion that the charismatic Father Flynn (Chris McGarry) has become too close to a young boy, who happens to be the school’s only African American student. Meanwhile, Flynn is struggling to modernize an institution whose headmistress ardently believes that “Frosty the Snowman” is a hymn to paganism.

Rehearsing earlier this month in Manhattan with McGarry, Jones is in street clothes and sandals, glasses her only costume piece. Yet she seems to be wearing an invisible nun’s habit, projecting a force of will that feels channeled rather than performed. A visceral, warm-blooded actor, McGarry fights back for all he’s worth, but he might as well be the lone Chinese student facing down a tank in Tiananmen Square.

After rehearsal, prop glasses carefully folded and placed in a special box, Jones sits down to chat. She may have lost Sister Aloysius’ flat Bronx accent but nothing of her indefatigable presence. The actress, who turns 50 later this fall, retains the athletic ease and immediacy of a teenager. She is all wide cheeks and mobile mouth, with luminescent, pale blue eyes that seem like portals to another world. Her face has an ageless look; with the smallest shift, she can move from Pippi Longstocking to Mother Courage.

There are great performers who hide in plain sight, in constant negotiation with the intimacy of being seen. But Jones is utterly, even blissfully, direct; like light, her energy takes the shortest path between two points. It is a physics of self irresistible to an audience, and one that gives Jones her unmistakably old-fashioned aura.

Perhaps it’s because Jones hails from the hills. She grew up in western Tennessee; her father was a florist, her mother taught English. Cherry was named for her maternal grandfather, Freeman Cherry, a tall tale of a man who served on the battleship Arizona during World War I and worked as a boxer, a railroad man and a documentary photographer. “I didn’t know him, but my grandfather had a real influence on my upbringing,” Jones says. “He absolutely believed in human dignity for one and for all. And when you’re born in west Tennessee in 1898, trust me, that’s a radical thought.”

Jones fell in love with the theater when her parents took her to see a 1972 production of Clifford Odets’ “The Country Girl” at the Barter Theatre in Abingdon, Va. -- a fitting venue for the vocational call of Freeman Cherry’s granddaughter. Founded during the Depression, Barter was named for its original “ham for Hamlet” policy of accepting farm produce in lieu of cash for admission. (The downstairs served as the town jail.)

“The actress came out to the lip of the stage for the final line of the play,” Jones recalls. “I was on the front row looking straight up at her. And as the stage lights went down, they flared up slightly like they used to do, where the performer would have to stay stationary until the ghosting light expired. I thought that light was the last escape of her spirit. And I thought, ooooh, I want to do this.”

Jones’ first paying acting job meant competing with pork instead of paying with it. “I started at the Barn Theater in Nashville, in ‘The Good Doctor.’ It was a dinner theater. I made $80 a week, plus tips, because we also served coffee and drinks.”

In 1980, after graduating from Carnegie Mellon University, Jones became a founding company member of American Repertory Theatre, the Cambridge, Mass., theater known for its commitment to innovation and craft.

“It was almost like being in the Army,” Jones says. “You didn’t audition. You were just told what you were playing and that was that.” Throughout the 1980s, Jones frequently worked with director Andre Serban, notorious for reducing actors -- not to mention audiences -- to tears of frustration. “Andre used to shame me, saying that I wanted too much to please the audience. He would call me a prostitute!” She laughs. “But from him I learned a simplicity, a focus, that I didn’t have before. Every engine had to be firing at all times. For me, artistically, those years were the gold standard.”

Serban has described Jones as having a “Joan of Arc” quality, and her singular effect on audiences was evident early on. “My strongest image of Cherry is from Serban’s ‘Three Sisters’ at ART,” says director Lisa Peterson, who has worked with Jones three times, including “Tongue of a Bird” at the Taper in 1999. “At the end of the first act, she ran straight downstage toward the audience, holding a lantern and crying, ‘To Moscow, to Moscow.’ You felt the sun was on the stage. She was like a beacon. Actually, I’m not sure she was even carrying a lantern. It might have just felt that way.”

A string of singular heroines and awards followed, including the marathon swimmer of Tina Howe’s “Pride’s Crossing” (Lucille Lortel, Outer Critics Circle and Drama Desk awards), a sister swept up in the sexual fantasia of Paula Vogel’s AIDS play, “The Baltimore Waltz” (Obie award) and the title role in the 1995 Broadway revival of “The Heiress.” Accepting her first Tony for “The Heiress,” Jones famously thanked her then-partner, architect Mary O’Connor, on live TV, making Jones the only out-lesbian ever to win a Tony.

While quietly becoming nothing less than the first lady of the American stage, Jones also appeared in smaller film roles. Many will know her as the cop investigating strange crop formations in M. Night Shyamalan’s “Signs” or the agonized Edie Bailey in “The Perfect Storm,” but her focus has remained firmly in the theater.

“Part of the pleasure of seeing Cherry work is that you realize you’re watching a dedicated life up there,” says Hughes, who also won a Tony for his work on “Doubt.” “She really does break herself down and rebuild each time she takes a part. And she’s always gravitated to the less glamorous side of the dial, playing people that society and show business chose to overlook. I mean, who would have thought a widowed Sister of Charity in 1964 would have become the toast of Broadway?”

Jones marvels at “Doubt’s” power to crawl under the skin. “People get very wrapped up in the play. I think it’s because they form a belief about what’s going on that they think is absolutely right and morally correct, and at the same time those beliefs are pushed and pulled and twisted about. And then in the end to realize that the person seated next to them has the exact opposite response to the play is infuriating, troubling, mystifying.”

After traveling to Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco for “Doubt,” Jones will hang up her habit. Among other things, she hopes to get back to the movies. “I do enjoy film work. I see my parts almost like character workshops. I’ve been so blessed in my theater career to be the person who comes on at the beginning of the play and doesn’t leave until the end. With film work, it’s so different, almost like creating in miniature. I like to try to figure it out. So I’m looking forward to that. And growing old in theater.”

*

‘Doubt’

Where: Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles

When: 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays; 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays; 2 and 7:30 p.m. Sundays. Call for exceptions.

Ends: Oct. 29

Price: $20 to $80

Contact: (213) 628-2772