By Harry Haun
08 Apr 2005
Even Thompson, who patterned the character after his own father, concedes a more than passing resemblance to Jones. "There's a lot of the essential aspects of that old guy up there on the stage," he says—and it's quite different from what Tom Aldredge originally created Off- and then on Broadway and what Henry Fonda repeated in the 1981 film, his last. Thompson, like Fonda and Katharine Hepburn, won Academy Awards for the film. Aldredge and Frances Sternhagen, from the first company, are still gainfully employed on Broadway (he as one of the Twelve Angry Men; she as one of the Steel Magnolias).
"I have two different plays I'm trying to get up and going right now," Thompson says. "One is called Ax of Love, and I've workshopped it a couple of times. It's about four people who meet in college in 1970, and it's the next 30 years of their lives, sort of a sociological character study over three decades. The new play is called Some Parts Missing, and it's about two former best friends who get together to try to build a basketball backboard for one of the men's sons. In the course of the 24 hours they spend trying to put the stupid thing up, all kinds of stuff comes out in their conversations."
There is also a TV pilot in the works—plus a screenplay that's being put into production called Elysian Farm in which he'll return to acting in the role of an investigating cop.
Director Folgia is still awed by what an easy evolution this revival has been. "It's nice when things happen by a natural force," he notes. "James Earl wanted to come back to the stage. There was no talk of anything long-term. He just wanted to bring himself back to the stage for a short term. We all signed on immediately because of his involvement. I'd never read the play. I got a call from producer Jeffrey Finn, saying On Golden Pond with James Earl Jones. I said, 'Wow.' He said, 'Can I send you the play?" I said, 'You don't have to send me a play. You said James Earl Jones. That's enough for me. I'll show up.'"
He had his own Tony-winning rooting section going for him on opening night—Zoe Caldwell and Terrence McNally, who both won Tonys for the Folgia-directed Master Class. She didn't want to be photographed, and he didn't want to discuss his new play, Dedication or the Stuff of Dreams, beyond saying that Tony winner Marian Seldes would be doing it in July at Primary Stages and would be playing a rich eccentric.
"Is this where they keep the Tony winners?" a reporter asked, spying four time winner Audra McDonald in an upstairs backbooth, flanked by her Passion's Michael Cerveris on the left and her Ragtime's Brian Stokes Mitchell on the right. She and Cerveris are still basking in the Passion acclaim they reaped last week for the televised "Jazz at Lincoln Center" edition they reprised from the Ravinia show they did two summers ago.
Mitchell also huddled with his about-to-be Bloody Mary, Lillias White. "She's the girl I love," he quipped about White, who on June 9 will join him, Reba McEntire, Jason Danieley and Conrad John Schuck for a South Pacific benefit at Carnegie Hall.
White will follow that with a Joe's Pub gig in July. She says she won't be doing the proposed spring revival of Purlie, although she just did a bang-up job of it for "Encores."
Other celebs making the scene were Dionne Warwick, Patricia Neal, Maurice Hines, Gold Metal Russian skater Oksana Baiul, David Dinkins, Anne Hathaway and, after Doubt was stilled at the Walter Kerr, Adriane Lenox, replete with her stand-by.
All were there to celebrate the 74-year-old new-born "comic," in his first Broadway outing since his Tony-winning performance in Fences 18 years ago. Too long a wait, that.
"We don't have control over that," Jones declared with booming authority. And from that base, his voice began building grandly. "No actor controls his fate! His destiny! It's all in the hands of the gods!" Then, he stepped down from Olympus and, with a wink to the reporter recording him faithfully, asided: "You can print all that. I don't mean a word of it."
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| The cast gives their opening night curtain call
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| photo by Aubrey Reuben |
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