James Earl Jones was born in Arkabutla, Mississippi, in 1931. He received his B.A. from the University of Michigan in 1953. He received a diploma from the American Theatre Wing and studied with Lee Strasberg. He has received many honorary degrees from universities including his alma mater, Princeton, Yale, and Columbia.  His numerous awards, including Obies, Tonys, Golden Globes, the National Medal of Arts, and the John Houseman Award, make too long a list to include in full here, but a few are Tony Awards for The Great White Hope and Fences, and the Vernon Rice Award and the Drama Desk Award for Othello. He also received the latter award for the all-black performance of The Cherry Orchard, appearing with Gloria Foster at the Public Theatre. Jones has appeared in several plays by Athol Fugard including Blood Knot, Master Harold and the Boys, and A Lesson From Aloes. His career in films is extensive, beginning with Dr. Strangelove in 1963. Almost everyone knows his voice as Darth Vader in Star Wars and as Mufasa in the film of The Lion King. His many television appearances on series, specials, and miniseries have drawn praise and many awards. Both his voice and his acting ability have made him one of the most recognized actors in present-day theatre. His great performance as the boxer Jack Jefferson onstage and in the 1970 film The Great White Hope (with Jane Alexander) will not be forgotten.

NEW YORK CITY, SEPTEMBER 1999

SHAFER: Now before you played in The Iceman Cometh you had been at Arena Stage and then you brought The Great White Hope to Broadway. How did it happen that you did The Iceman Cometh? How did that come about?

JONES: Do you want to start with my O’Neill beginning?

SHAFER: Oh, yes, please.

JONES: I think I can fit it better in my mind. The key thing to notice, one summer there were picketers on the Boston Commons. The picketers were members of the NAACP. The NAACPwas picketing a production called The Emperor Jones, because it used the “n”word. That is the ass end of it. We didn’t give a shit about what they were doing.I didn’t.  The word “nigger”is part of our psyche. And I think Dick Gregory once tried to dispel it by writing a book called Nigger. And if we say it enough it will go away. Not quite true, but closer than getting all uptight about it. But then I can say that because no one has ever called me nigger. I don’t know how I would respond if someone did.

Okay, so that is the ass end of it. The head end of that production, in 1964, was a gathering of young Turks including Dudley Moore, Ben Shacklin was the director, and myself and a bunch of great dancers. One of those earlier heterosexual choreographers and myself and the dancers. The concept that Ben had was to go somewhere new with The Emperor Jones. I was bothered from the beginning, and even at the very end, that there were no drum sounds. Dudley used only a piano.

SHAFER: No kidding!

JONES: The whole score was a piano and whatever percussion sounds you could get out of a piano. Which is not drums, but I said, “That’s exciting, let’s do it.”The choreographer had choreographed some of the greatest young dancers into being all those energies in the play, besides Smithers and Jones and Ol’Lynn. Lynn, Jones, Smithers, and the old lady were cast with actors. Tom McDermott played Smithers.  But every other unit of energy was a dancer. So they could be rocks at times. They could be trees at times, they could be part of a jungle at times. Once when Jones is trying to escape through the forest, I would escape through massive, beautiful, strong, young dancing arms and legs. But we opened there. Actually, that is all we did. We played in Boston outdoors on the Commons. I was in good shape then. I was in my, more or less, my Great White Hope shape so I was presentable in loincloth. And when they hung the Emperor up by his heels you just see him in his drawers. I don’t remember any reviews of that production, at the Boston Commons. But, I remember having the feeling, because Kennedy had just been elected, that we had all this young energy. It was like a new order, if you want to use that phrase,of young theatre energy.And in a way,led by Dudley,with his “Iwill not use drums, I will use piano.”It was very exciting to us.  We didn’t care what the audience thought or what the picketers thought. And that’s the end of that story.

Then later we rehearsed that play at the Eugene O’Neill Center, then we took it to Europe. We never played in New York City. Donny McKayle was the choreographer and did something similar. He used his dancers, not as part of the inorganic and the sort of the non-human light, but as the human—the ghost life of the Emperor Jones. He used dancing, the parasols, the auctioneers, and all that sort of thing. He brought it to life with these dancers and then other nights he gave a dance concert. And then we played The Emperor Jones. So I did not have to work every night.

SHAFER: Was it a long tour?

JONES: We went all over Europe, yeah, and ended up in Scotland at the Edinburgh Festival. The best performance, the best communication, was had with the audiences in Holland, in Amsterdam, because they understood English as well as Americans did. The Scottish had a little problem with the accents, with mine in particular and being a Southern African American accent. They didn’t seem to understand the “snoogers.”But otherwise, the Dutch didn’t care.

SHAFER: So then after that?

JONES: That was it.

SHAFER: Why didn’t it ever play here?

JONES: They didn’t want it. I don’t know why it didn’t play here.

SHAFER: Oh, so then after this time, was it considerably after this time, that The Iceman Cometh was performed?

JONES: The Iceman Cometh came out of a complex situation. I have a long history with Ted Mann from the Circle in the Square and my father did also with the Circle in the Square. And I think Ted wanted to do an Athol Fugard play. I knew that Ted wanted to do it, but I made the mistake of mentioning it to Lloyd Richards. And so Lloyd made his bid right away and of course, what he offered Athol was the same that he offered August Wilson: a place to work away from New York, an ivory tower. And Athol had to take it. So I thought that I had betrayed Ted in a way. So he and I kept the friendship and we were talking about two other plays. He said, “I am doing O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, you want to think about Hickey?”I said, “I can’t get Jason (Robards) out of my mind.” Because it was the first piece I saw after my Broadway tour, my grand tour, with my father. He took me to see everything, the ballet, opera, drama, comedy. And then I saw my father play Joe Mott in The Iceman at the old Circle in the Square, and I said, “I cannot, and I don’t know if anybody can, get Jason out of their mind.”And it wasn’t just that another actor couldn’t do that. But another actor would have to have the quixotic energy that Jason did. Jason created it by tapping his fingers and a lot of really fast talk, salesman type fast-talk. I am lethargic. I am not that kind of temperament. And I said, “I worry, Ted.”But I said, “I would consider it if you will give me a chance to do Of Mice and Men at your theatre.”He said “Okay, it’s a deal.”And that didn’t work out either, because I ended up doing Mice and Men with Ed Sherin on Broadway. Okay, back to The Iceman. He gathered a group of young actors; there were no stars. So in a way, Ted became the star. This producer, who was very successful, was going to do his best as a director. He and Joe Papp were the worst directors possible. But they were great producers, and they were always trying to direct and always failed. But Ted was determined to give it one more try and he succeeded.

SHAFER: Yes, good.

JONES: He cast sort of no one who would shine, do star turns on him, but just young actors to do the play.

SHAFER: Do you remember who some of them were?

JONES: Steve McHattie was one of them. Steve played the young kid, that’s the first one that comes to mind. Stefan Gierasch played the old man. And when it opened Ted got the hit reviews and it was what he needed, you know. And I wasn’t trying to do star turns anyway, because I kept saying to him, “I can’t find that temperament in me. So what I do might take the play down, might make the play too heavy temperamentally and maybe emotionally.”I think there’s an insanity in Hickey and with Jason’s kind of quixotic energy you get a flash of that. I think that with that young man on Broadway, Kevin Spacey, you get something similar.

SHAFER: Did you see it?

JONES: Yeah, I loved it. But I couldn’t help but compare it with Jason’s. I mean Kevin is close enough to Jason’s energy. There was something almost amateur about that production contrasted to the one off-Broadway. Something British got into it, the British didn’t put it together,didn’t quite understand about the play and about America and about American characters. But it worked and Kevin was spectacular. Kevin played it like an avenging angel.  Jason played it like a seducer. And I don’t know what I played it like; I haven’t yet figured it out. You have to ask others! It was not successful for me.

SHAFER: No, I saw some good reviews of it. I saw some that were a little reluctant, but I didn’t see any negative. I looked it up.

JONES: Really, I’d stopped reading reviews by then.

SHAFER: No, you are wrong, if I may say so sir. Many of the critics thought you were wonderful.

JONES: I don’t read reviews, so I don’t know. But I know that it was not successful just from the way it felt. But it is a good play. There I met a great play.

SHAFER: How long did you run it?

JONES: It was a limited time engagement, several months.

SHAFER: And that was all you were playing, it wasn’t repertory?

JONES: No.

SHAFER: That was in the new theatre?

JONES: Yes, midtown.

SHAFER: As an experience of playing it, you didn’t play the whole play uncut, did you?

JONES: Yeah, oh yeah.

SHAFER: The whole play? There wasn’t any cutting? And it was four-and-a-half hours or so every night. So did you do matinees, too?

JONES: Uh huh, as far as I remember, yeah. Yeah, and just like Kevin’s, that’s a long sit. But the audience didn’t seem to mind. I didn’t mind sitting there. You get transported.

SHAFER: As far as the character and getting into it, what did you try to do since you didn’t feel that it was suited to your nature?What did you do to try and come up with some other alternatives?

JONES: Well, rather then the seducer or the avenging angel, I was somewhat a preacher I guess, somewhat self-righteous and having found the answer, which was kill the one you love, that’s the answer.  (Laughs.) And then you kill the thing that you love. It was dark and I could not help but play a dark Hickey. The dark both physically and judgmentally, and therefore not as enjoyable as the other interpretations.

SHAFER: Did you think that the comedy at the beginning played, though? There is some comedy there.

JONES: I don’t know, I can’t even tell a joke.

SHAFER: But you were funny in Great White Hope.

JONES: Well, and in Fences people were laughing for the better part of that.

SHAFER: Exactly.

JONES: But that’s because of the writing. You give me an irony and I can’t do an irony. And sometimes it makes you nervous and you laugh. Often, inappropriately, which is a problem for me! No, I didn’t look for the comedy in it. I was willing, I think, because I had just had the experience with The Great White Hope. And I hadn’t learned that you don’t bend your character to be entertaining or to be accessible to the audience or to be palatable to the audience. I haven’t learned that totally, none of us do. Because we always want the audience to like us. I think I trod lightly, that’s the only accommodation I made. I wasn’t dooming anybody because after all in O’Neill’s world he had a black guy in the play.  And the black guy was not running things. He was an important member of that group, but he was not running things. My black guy comes in and he was running things. And I felt, I said, “First of all, Ted, Hickey’s a Hoosier, that is not only a Caucasian, but it’s a very particular German-background Caucasian, really Aryan American, the Hoosiers.”I guess they are a German derived, aren’t they? Anyway they have certain almost Calvinistic attitudes about sex and pleasure and playing cards and stuff. So Hickey is working out of a great social depression, social psychic depression and I was able to get in touch with that to some extent, but only like a reformed preacher. A preacher ready to join the devil, rather than God.

SHAFER: Do you remember now who played Joe Mott in that?

JONES: Arthur French. I see him all the time.

SHAFER: To you, was it odd, the business that you say that here’s this black man that was part of the group and then you come in?

JONES: No, that was not at all odd. The same thing happened in Of Mice and Men. I played Lenny as a black person. I asked when Steinbeck was alive, I said, “Sir, I would like to play your Lenny, but I am black.” (I wrote to him.) I mean you rarely, as an actor, get to talk to a live writer who might want to change things. Who might be inclined to change a few words here or there to accommodate a different ethnicity. He said, “Jim, don’t change a thing. Lenny if he is black doesn’t know he’s black.He doesn’t know what the word ‘nigger’ means, he doesn’t know any of the social contexts. Just play in the middle of it all.”And it worked and in a way, Ted pretty much advised me to do the same thing with Hickey. Play Hickey, do not play a black Hickey. I think that the sort of preacher syndrome was the closest I came to anything ethnic. I tried not to do the huffing and puffing preaching, but that’s where I was coming from. My father’s father happened to be what we called a “jack-legged preacher,”unordained.  Men who get the calling and go out preaching without a license. So there is some of that tradition in the family.

SHAFER: Well, I think that this is so wonderfully interesting that your father was in The Iceman Cometh and that you were in The Iceman Cometh. I think that’s probably not a very likely thing to happen.

JONES: My father and I have a weird professional relationship, that stuff is always happening. (Laughing.) We’re always doing something like that—it was nothing unusual.

SHAFER: I think that some people would recognize him from being in the movie The Sting.

JONES: That one movie I mention, even with young people, they know, “Oh that’s your dad, the one with the mustache,”they say, “handsome guy, wasn’t he,”and I say, “Yes, he was very handsome and a fitting sidekick for and a fitting cause for the revenge theme.”

SHAFER: Can I take it back a little further again to this Emperor Jones . . .?

JONES: (Laughing) Which one?

SHAFER: Either one.

JONES: They sort of run together.

SHAFER: One of the things that the audience wouldn’t think of is how much work that role is for the actor. The audience just sits there and sees it happening and it’s fine, you know, but they don’t think about what the actor is doing.

JONES: I almost said that when I mentioned the production in Europe with Donny McKayle, he gave us one night off, one night on. It was a great relief because I would lose weight every night in that role.  Because after the first scene, which is a glorious and dramatic scene . . .

SHAFER: You get a wonderful exit line there: “Well, if dey ain’t no whole brass band to see me off, I sho’got de drum part of it.”

JONES: That’s one of the great scenes, I think, in writing. After that he is on the run, and really on the run. I’d run back offstage and tear part of my clothes off and I’d come back and I am on the other side of the stage. And the audience knew this guy is running around like this and that. But there is no other way of doing it, that part should be a movie. The only way to achieve the Emperor Jones after the first scene is to go right to the film. Right to the videotape, because there is no way to create it.

SHAFER: About the costume, now that is another part that the audience doesn’t think of. You’ve actually got all of these pieces that are being changed while you are acting.

JONES: Yes, you start out in full regalia uniform and you end up in your drawers. By the way, Paul Robeson probably had done not only the definitive Othello of the Western world, but probably the definitive Emperor Jones. You’ve seen the movie, I’m sure. He is gorgeous and glorious as a specimen of man and a black man and a man with all those talents and endowments. He brings you a Brutus Jones that you’d like to get to know. (Laughing.)

SHAFER: With your costume, for example, did you actually take something off and put on something else?

JONES: No, the crew backstage would do it, I just ran. They were grabbing things and velcroed things.

SHAFER: It is a very exciting role to play isn’t it?

JONES: Well, yeah, but the excitement of the first scene is very different from the excitement of just keeping on like a marathon.  Keeping moving, because if you let the audience think about it too much they will start thinking, “Well, where is he now?”In a way, that is why heightening the musical aspect of it, as Dudley did, and heightening the ballet aspect of it, that Dudley’s choreographer and Donald McKayle did, that helps. It gives the audience something to focus on. It gives them something that’s been stylized.

SHAFER: With the performance that you gave following these things (much later really) of Robeson—is there material in that about O’Neill?

JONES: You know, I don’t think we even mentioned The Emperor Jones in that. We mentioned O’Neill only in relationship to All God’s Chillun. We pointed out the irony, I was again in Boston, and again pickets. This time some asshole with Rastafarian hair, fake, had picked up the cry that Paul Robeson, Jr., had said that this production is a fraud, you know. This production is a desecration of my father’s image. So they had policemen on horses outside the theatre, this is Boston, this is many years ago. And so I walked into the theatre. This man kept following me around and I said, “Are you a member of the cast?”And he said, “No, I’m your man who is carrying a pistol.”And I laughed; I just broke out laughing. That happened to Paul Robeson in the theatre downtown (New York) in the production of All God’s Chillun. There were so many letters and so much agitation going around about the black guy playing opposite a white woman on the stage. To have a black guy on the stage in a hero role was bad enough. O’Neill hired him a bodyguard and Paul said he was the shortest man with the biggest gun he’d ever seen in the business! (Laughs.)

SHAFER: Did you meet Paul Robeson?

JONES: I met him three times, me and my father. I can’t say that I knew the man, I just met him. Like a fan, and I certainly was a fan!

SHAFER: Now as you look back at such plays as All God’s Chillun Got Wings and Emperor Jones—those were important opportunities for him as an actor.

JONES: And it brought out one of those ironies, too, that he was on the make. He wanted it; he was hungry for life. He was not a seducer, women came after him, and he didn’t chase them. But life, he chased life. He wanted his life. And when the chance came to replace Gilpin, I think, I don’t know what his conscience said to him, but I think he tried to have no problem with that. His career was now moving and if something got pushed aside, okay. It was only later, after London, after he saw how full of holes the whole Western dream was, and he saw Spain with Franco when he went there, then he changed. He was no longer interested in being a millionaire as he had been. He gave it all up. And from Spain on until the day he died. He put himself, in a way, on hold. It’s fascinating.

SHAFER: It is, it is indeed. And as you say, women pursued him, people were fascinated by him when he had those opportunities in the two O’Neill plays. I mean all the people described him as beautiful and with the greatest voice of any actor of the time. I am sure people would say that about you now.

JONES: No, my father was a Paul Robeson protégéin a lot of ways, except musically. Neither my father nor I can sing and that’s what is remembered more than Paul the activist. Or Paul the one endowed with all the great talents. Thankfully, we can hear on records.

SHAFER: With those two roles, there came a turning point for African American actors in the American theatre. Do you feel that now sometimes people look back and they say that Jones is a stereotype and the play is filled with stereotypes? And that in All God’s Chillun Got Wings, the guy loses everything, he doesn’t come out ahead in any way? I mean people take a negative attitude about these plays.

JONES: That’s true, that’s still true. It took the longest time for the black guy to ever win the girl. The black guy always ended up dead or lost. So O’Neill gave us the first fully heroic African American character for the stage. And you might say, yes, so the Emperor Jones ends up hanging by his heels. That’s not the point.If O’Neill set out to write a straight play about a deposed dictator from a Caribbean island, like Haiti, it might never have been produced.  And it sure wouldn’t have been a whole lot of fun. So he gave me something that was going to be a whole lot of fun. So he gave you something with a whole lot of fun and a great commentary on American capitalist sentiment. Maybe sentiment isn’t right. But Brutus Jones was the ultimate capitalist, the ultimate exploiter. And that’s not black, that’s American. And O’Neill was exploring that, I think, with Brutus Jones.

SHAFER: That’s a very interesting viewpoint.

JONES: What’s the phrase, “greed is good?”Selfishness, ultimate selfishness. The long green.

SHAFER: Yeah, the long green. And, “I puts my Bible on the shelf,” huh? (Both laughing.)

JONES: Yeah, that’s what O’Neill was writing about. He wasn’t writing about a black guy who overreached himself and failed, ended up on his heels. He was writing about the American spirit.

SHAFER: Wonderful, that’s very nice.

JONES: And it was going on in the Caribbean countries, too. We did a lot of stuff down there in the name of money.Hawaii, you know the history of Hawaii, oh God. We were doing that all the time, we were all Brutus Joneses in different colors. Guys down there and in South America are still reeling from our exploitation. And that’s what O’Neill is writing about.

SHAFER: So you think that the play holds up?

JONES: I don’t know!

SHAFER: But in terms of what he was attempting?

JONES: The NAACP may have cooled off a little bit about the use of the word “nigger,”but otherwise the play is not archaic. It is not a play that doesn’t work anymore. It is, How does the play work after the first scene?

SHAFER: Can I just ask you, I know you have got to go, have you seen other O’Neill productions that you remember, that you enjoyed?

JONES: I’ve only seen The Iceman Cometh. Both Jason’s and Kevin’s. I have never seen any other production. And Paul Robeson’s movie, The Emperor Jones. I remember once trying to, I missed—who’s the actor from Charles Playhouse up in Boston, he played The Hairy Ape?

SHAFER: Willem Dafoe?

JONES: Yeah, Willem Dafoe. And I think that he must have been a wonderful Hairy Ape, too. I remember trying at a fundraiser with Ted (Mann) to read some scenes out of The Hairy Ape and I thought I’d knock this off. But, boy! O’Neill’s dialogue is often very difficult, because he over-ethnicizes, he puts in too much accent. And the actor is busy trying to stay on top of that bucking bronco, rather than the dialogue whatever way it comes out. I found that with Hairy Ape, I found that dialogue very difficult.

SHAFER: Really, that’s very interesting. And Robeson played that role.

JONES: Oh, Hairy Ape, no, no, Robeson I don’t think he ever played it, did he?

SHAFER: I just read that myself in the Dictionary of Black Theatre and I was surprised. It was in 1931.

JONES: Well, he should have, yeah. The Hairy Ape is this stevedore in the hull of this ship, this freighter, and he’s the darkest kind of a human being, he’s an animal. If Robeson played it, that’s good to hear.

SHAFER: So those were the only times that you had anything more to do with O’Neill? At this benefit? So, I guess that in the overall arc of your career, O’Neill hasn’t been any central force, but has given you some interesting experiences.

JONES: And also acknowledging that he probably led a whole wave of creativity that went to Miller and Williams, but then opened up a whole road for the avant garde theatre which is of my time. And all the plays of avant garde theatre don’t last. I mean Beckett has a few that are worth doing. But they are all experiments and O’Neill started it. Suddenly now, theatre is proletarian. It is not for the Barrymore characters. It’s not tea and crumpets, it’s not pickled salmon and coffee tables and lace fans. It’s about human problem-solving and I think that, because he was more or less a socialist himself, I think that he opened the door to the theatre to being proletarian as it is now. You don’t have to have descended from the Barrymores to be an actor, you can just walk off the street and get yourself together and be an actor.

SHAFER: But you descended from an actor.

JONES: Yeah, I did, and a good one, too!

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