Out lesbian actor Cherry Jones has long been one of Broadway’s most-lauded performers, but she has also long been a celebrity lesbian to be proud of. When she accepted her first Tony Award in 1995 for Best Actress (she played the role of Catherine Sloper in The Heiress), she publicly thanked her female partner in her acceptance speech.
In June 2005, Jones took home a second Tony for her leading role in Doubt, which is now touring nationally.
The night she received her Tony for Doubt, Jones was accompanied by her current girlfriend, Sarah Paulson (Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip), and the two have often been seen together at industry events.
Jones does more than acknowledge her life as a lesbian; she isn’t afraid to play one on stage or on TV, either. In 1993 she played a lesbian mom in lesbian playwright Paula Vogel’s And Baby Makes Seven, and in 2001 she played another lesbian mom while co-starring with Brooke Shields in the Lifetime movie What Makes a Family.
AfterEllen.com recently talked with Jones about her role in Doubt, which tells the story of Catholic school principal Sister Aloysius (Jones), who suspects that the school’s charismatic priest may be paying inappropriate attention to one of the male students. Riveting, unflinching and occasionally humorous, Doubt – and Jones’ presence in it – is simply unforgettable.
AfterEllen.com: You are touring in the play Doubt, for which you received much acclaim and a Tony Award. You must feel very strongly about the play and the role to continue performing it. Cherry Jones: I’m right at about 555 performances already of this play. [Laughs.] We started at the Manhattan Theater Club, and then Broadway, and the tour began in September in Los Angeles. We’re not even halfway through with it yet. And the extraordinary thing about this play and this role is that I never get tired of it. Maybe there’s something wrong with me [and] I’m just incredibly obsessive/compulsive. I think most stage actors are, or have to be a little bit. I was just talking to my fellow cast members about this the other night. Because of what we get back from the audience, it is the most rewarding experience any actor will almost ever have in the theater.
We’ve all been in plays and productions that have been successful, and we’ve had personal success with things, but I have never, in 30 years in the theater, worked on a play that the audience … it literally feels, 10 minutes into the play, that the audience appropriates it as their own, and we are just there to serve it and the audience. It’s just remarkable how involved people become.
Because it [the play] goes to one of the oldest gut needs that we have as human beings, and that is the need to know – the need to know that we are right. That what we feel and believe and what we feel and think is true and correct. There are so many times in life that we cannot know, and we’re not satisfied with that, nor can we rest comfortably.
John [Patrick Shanley], our playwright, said that when he was a young man, people with doubt were considered wise people, and now they’re considered weak people. We’ve lost our appreciation for the fact that doubt is the genesis of most mature decisions. You need to start with an open mind and survey the lay of the land before you rush to judgment.
AE: I’m so glad that you mentioned the way the audience was responding to the play, because there is the scene where Sister Aloysius meets with student Donald’s mother, Mrs. Muller, in her office, and there is a turning point in the play. There was an audible collective intake of breath from the audience. So you would say that you are attuned to those kinds of audience reactions? CJ: Oh, yes! We hear everything. There is literally a point in that play, every night. It’s around the time that Mrs. Muller says, “Please leave my son out of this; my husband would kill him over a thing like this.” Almost every night … I hear someone pop their knuckles right at that moment. [Laughs.] The tension becomes so great in the audience, and the audience is suffering with her so [much] at that point, that you just hear this knuckle pop. Every single night someone pops their knuckles!
The different reactions that the play elicits – you never know from night to night. One night, at Manhattan Theater Club, very early on, when the lights faded on me after I say “I have doubts,” a woman on the front row said audibly, “May she burn in hell.”
We were once collecting for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, and this man came up practically spitting in my face, and the next person after him was this very liberal, very enlightened-looking San Franciscan woman, who said, “She’s my new role model.” You just can never tell.
AE: Speaking of doubts, did you ever have any doubts that you would be playing Sister Aloysius? CJ: Well, I did. My agent got it to me to read, and I fell in love with it and recognized that it’s a great American play, but I think they’d asked about three different actresses before they got down the pecking order to me. I immediately said yes, and then the closer we got to rehearsal, I thought, “I am never going to be able to pull this off. I’m Methodist; I’m from Tennessee.”
My greatest fear every night is that I’m going to get the Hail Mary wrong and be corrected collectively by 400 people en masse.
But it’s so beautifully written, and Doug Hughes is such an amazing director, that I was able to, apparently, really do a dead ringer for a lot of people’s nuns. I wish I had a list of names that people have come by after the show and said, “You reminded me exactly of Sister …” and they always have these terrifying names. These wild names that you never knew existed. I’m so glad that I got to do it. I would not have missed this ride for anything.
AE: You mentioned Shanley’s writing. What has it been like for you to be speaking his words? CJ: The thing that I loved when I first read it was that it was wildly creative language that was so true to the period and the characters, true to their demographic, and yet heightened and theatrical in the way that all good plays have to be, and yet always rings so true. I did not grow up in the Bronx in 1964, but to my ear it just sounds so true. Sometimes you get plays, even very good plays, where everyone sometimes sounds a little bit alike.
That’s not the case with this play. You get these separate, strong individuals. And also that he’s able to do it in 90 minutes, that there’s no release. He springs his trap early on, and he’s got us for the next 90 minutes. People have said, “It’s not a great American play.” Well, if it’s not a great American play, then it’s a damn good one. I think it’s a great American play because it’s going to be done for the next 500 years.
AE: I also think it will have a life that goes beyond the present day. As Sister Aloysius, you undergo an incredible physical transformation. CJ:I don’t know when that really started, except that I thought early on in rehearsals that I didn’t want her to have that ramrod straight sort of Rosalind Russell, Trouble With Angels kind of posture. I wanted her to look a little weather-beaten and worn. Also it creates someone who’s more protective and defensive. I decided that she’d had a hysterectomy as a young woman and had had no calcium since she was a very young woman and has terrible osteoporosis. She’s really not in very good health. She’s actually very fragile, but she has this will of iron.
I heard Mother Teresa interviewed once, and she sounded like this Albanian truck driver. She did not have a saintly, beautiful voice. It was [makes a raspy sound] very gravelly.
John [Patrick Shanley] has made this sort of unlovable creature. Doug [Hughes] was the one who encouraged me to embrace that. Initially I wanted to make her very noble, and I wanted people to understand why she thinks the crazy things she thinks, and why she feels the way she does about “Frosty the Snowman.” [Laughs.]
The best example of telling you about this … was when I was it with [actor] Brian [F. O’Byrne] initially at Manhattan Theater Club, and we were rehearsing the tea scene where I confront Father Flynn, and she’s sort of interrogating him. I wanted to do it really well. I wanted her to be very sly and cunning in her interrogation. And Doug said, “No, she’s terrible at it.” Because she’s so emotionally involved, she’s so hot, she can’t do it well. [Laughs.] When he told me that, I thought, “Of course!”
That’s when I started to embrace her flaws and realize that’s what’s going to make it fun to play this woman.
AE: After performing Doubt for New York theater audiences and also in Los Angeles, how is the play being received in other parts of the country? CJ: I think really well. I think everybody, whether you intellectually get what this play is about or you see it as thriller or an indictment of the trickle-down effects of corruption on high, the lack of democracy in an institution — however you want to view this play, there is really something there for every audience. As they say in business: for every market. [Laughs.] I’ll never forget that we performed this play one Thursday morning at 10 a.m. for 1,900 Los Angeles public high school students, and you could have heard a pin drop.
From the age of 12 or 13 up, there is no one that this play does not engage. And if it doesn’t engage people, people have taken a resistance pill.
AE: Does your connection to this role also mean that if there is a film version of Doubt that you will be the actress playing Sister Aloysius? CJ: No. And no one should feel sorry for me. [Laughs.] I think that John has completed the screenplay. I have not seen it. Number one, they’ll need to get a box office name for the role. And number two, with a role like this they can get somebody really, really good. I’m an expert in the theater, not an expert — I feel like an old workhorse, half the time. I still don’t know what I’m doing in the theater, half the time. But there are people who really know the craft of film. I do not. I’ve had lots of interesting little film roles, but I’ve never carried a film.
Also, after having played her for so long onstage, if push came to shove, I probably could do her on-screen, but I would really have to rethink her, I think, to bring her to the screen. But, no, it’s not going to be me [laughs], and I’m completely fine about that, honestly. I’ve gotten so much more out of this role and getting to play her and getting to tour with it then I ever dreamed possible.
AE: Finally, as an out actress, how do you see your role in the LGBT community? CJ: Just to live my life openly and freely and with joy and thanksgiving, I reckon. [Laughs.] Just be.
For more information on Doubt, including when it will be visiting your city, visit doubtthetour.com.
