THERE’S A GIANT IN THE SKY
September 10, 2024: Theatre Yesterday and Today, by Ron Fassler
James Earl Jones, who died yesterday at ninety-three, was not only the first dramatic actor to take my breath away onstage, he was also the first dramatic actor I ever saw onstage. The Great White Hope was my sixth Broadway show and I bought the ticket myself — $3.60 — the first non-musical I ever attended. Seeing Jones on a Saturday matinee, two days after my twelfth birthday from the last row of the Alvin Theatre, was one of the highlights of my young theatregoing life. Watching him as boxer Jack Jefferson in Howard Sackler’s Pulitzer and Tony Award winning drama was akin to being punched in the stomach; I was literally gasping at the range and scope of his performance. I had never seen anything like it. And fifty-years later, it remains so.
Jones had made his Broadway debut ten years earlier in 1958 with a small role in Sunrise at Campobello, the first of what came to twenty-one Broadway shows over the next six decades. With just as many to his credit off-Broadway, he also performed regionally, which is where both his Tony Award winning performances were first staged; The Great White Hope in Washington, D.C. and August Wilson’s Fences in New Haven, CT. And in a full circle journey, Campobello played the Cort Theatre, renamed the James Earl Jones in 2022 in honor of his enormous contributions to the American Theatre. I was in attendance at the dedication ceremony and can tell you that it was a genuine thrill when they unveiled the new marquee. Absent from the event, this short video of Jones getting a private tour of the renovation was shown to mark the occasion. It is deeply moving:
Born in rural Arkabutla, Mississippi in 1931, Jones had a childhood far from the bright lights of the big city. Nothing strange in that, considering many actors are drawn to a life in the theatre from even farther distances and greater personal obstacles. Jones’s major stumbling block, a tough one when your sights are set on becoming an actor, was that he stuttered as a child, causing him painful shyness and anxiety.
Things were fine for a few years until a traumatic move to Jackson, Michigan forced another separation. The changes in adjusting to the north from the south caused young Jimmy’s already tenuous hold on things to exacerbate his minor stutter into something major. In his autobiography, Voices and Silences, he wrote: “For about eight years, from the time I was six until I was about fourteen, I was virtually mute.”
His young parents didn’t have a clue how to care for him, and separated from one another directly after his birth, his father taking off for the west coast. His mother then drifted away, leaving Jones to be raised by his maternal grandparents, whom he adored and called Mama and Papa.
As a young man, Jones was finally reunited in New York with his father, who by this time had become an actor. Blacklisted from work in film and television like so many others in the late 1940s and early 50s, Robert Earl Jones took refuge in the close-knit world of the New York theatre. This example provided his son with the template of a safe haven which he never abandoned, even though he played an astonishing number of great roles in film and television, winning two Emmy Awards (both on the same night), and even a career Academy Award for distinguished achievement in 2011. He couldn’t be at the ceremony because he was in London performing onstage in Driving Miss Daisy opposite Vanessa Redgrave. He was eighty.
To say it was a pleasure to have seen James Earl Jones onstage is an understatement. Beyond that afternoon at The Great White Hope, I got to see him in Lorraine Hansberry’s Les Blancs, Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, and in Philip Hayes Dean’s Paul Robeson—all I them before I turned twenty-one. In later years, I sat in awe as he shined in Othello,opposite Christopher Plummer, and as successor to the Tony Award-winning Zakes Mokae in Master Harold… and the Boys, by Athol Fugard, one of Jones’s favorite playwrights.
It was close to twenty years after his Jack Jefferson in The Great White Hope that I saw his Troy Maxon in August Wilson’s Fences. The play calls for its actors to both underplay and scale operatic heights, the very dimensions in which Jones specialized. It doesn’t hurt that he was larger than life at a commanding 6’2” and a voice unlike anybody else’s. Deep, penetrating… how else to describe it? Well, he was Darth Vader after all.
In 2012, while still living in Los Angeles, I was on a visit to New York when a revival of Gore Vidal’s The Best Man was playing its final weekend. I didn’t plan on seeing it, since memories of a revival a dozen years earlier were still fresh. But how could I not when Jones was playing former President Art Hockstader, a wonderful part? So, I bought a ticket for the last performance that, for all I knew, might have marked his final appearance on Broadway. Then three years later, I was back in the city when the 2015 revival of Kaufman and Hart’s You Can’t Take It With You was playing, with Jones as Grandpa Vanderhoff. It turned out to be its closing weekend, so I didn’t hesitate and, just as I had three years prior, I bought a ticket, one which I thought really would be Jones’s last time on the boards. Of course, in that same year he came back in a revival of D.L. Coburn’s The Gin Game, co-starring Cicely Tyson. Sadly, I missed that one as it did mark his final Broadway appearance.
After You Can’t Take It with You’s final performance, I had to go backstage and introduce him to my son Jeremy, who adored him the same way I did. After Jeremy told Jones he was leaving soon for Russia to study at the Moscow Art Theatre, he looked my son dead in the eye and said: “Stay away from Putin.”
But that wasn’t the last time I saw James Earl Jones on stage. In 2017, when it was announced he would be playing a small role in a revival of Tennessee Williams’s The Night of the Iguana at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I made sure to be there.
As Nonno, the ailing nonagenarian, described by Williams as “a minor league poet with a major league spirit,” Jones was perfection. Outfitted in an ill-fitting, tattered and stained linen suit, he wheeled onto the stage early in the evening (as the script dictates), sporting a wig identical to Frederick Douglas’s massive mane; the leonine hairstyle suiting the character for whom a haircut would be of little importance. Since Nonno is confined to a wheelchair, Jones’s movements were restricted, lending extra authority to his already formidable vocal instrument. To have seen this eighty-six-year-old bring his enormous reservoirs of grace and dignity to the role was a thing to behold. Nonno has been working on finishing a poem, according to his daughter, for many years. And his method of composing is to speak the poem aloud, repeating the phrases until he finds the last ones which will complete it. Images of oranges falling off a tree are part of its rich poetry, and when Nonno does achieve its completion, naturally his life is over.
It felt this time that I was truly seeing what did, in fact, turn out to be his last time performing live in a theatre, his natural home. Due to age and infirmity, his final hurrah was speaking the poetry of Tennessee Williams and dying onstage. How fitting. How beautiful.
Blessed is the only word I can muster for what a privilege it was to have seen him this one last time, adding yet another chance for me to experience his special magic — an actor of grace and majesty.
Rest in Peace, James Earl Jones.
Please keep an eye out for my new book, The Show Goes On: A History of Broadway Hirings, Firings and Replacements, available this winter. Follow me here on Medium and also visit my website RonFassler.org.
