The
queen. The caretaker. The police officer. The judge.
If she's a figure of authority, chances are Ora Jones has played
her on stage. The actor's presence is so commanding that she's
often assigned roles historically filled by men -- like the Stage
Manager in Thornton Wilder's Our Town, an American classic
given an acclaimed staging last fall at the new Writers' Theatre
in Glencoe, Illinois.
But Jones, a 1985 Notre Dame graduate, can't see it. "I asked
a friend once, 'How come I always get these roles?' And she said,
'Because you always sound like you know what you're talking about.'
And I said, 'I don't know what I'm talking about half the time!'"
Jones laughs. "I'm this woman who can barely run her own life."
Maybe she exaggerates. She works almost continually in the top
tier of the Chicago theater scene -- at the Goodman Theatre (Proof,
Boy Gets Girl, The Beard of Avon), Court Theatre
(The Misanthrope), Steppenwolf Theatre Company (The
Violet Hour) and with such smaller troupes as Rivendell Theatre
Ensemble, which featured Jones in its recent production of Knowing
Cairo. And she has one of the best actor's day jobs in the
city, performing educational programs at the Art Institute.
It's not a bad career for someone who blew her first audition.
"I was 7 or 8 years old, and I had made it clear that I was going
to be an actor," recalls Jones, whose military family was living
in Panama at the time. "The show was Oliver!, and I had
to sing a couple of lines from 'Where Is Love?' Well, I didn't
know it. It was terrible. I just wanted to go home. I think more
parents should take their kids to auditions, if they say they
want to be actors. That would cure it."
Her own cure seemed to hold until she got to Notre Dame. Jones
says she wanted a broad university education, not conservatory
coddling, and to play piccolo in the Fighting Irish marching band.
But the theater faculty kept pulling her on stage.
"She was very reticent," recalls professor emeritus Reginald
Bain, who saw Jones as Sally Bowles in Cabaret when she
was just a freshman. "Boy, did she light up the stage. . . . But
she was very shy about going into theater."
That shyness still grips Jones at times, even after two decades
in the profession and despite her outward appearance of utter
self-possession. Her portrayal of the seductive Jessie Brewster
in Richard Greenberg's The Violet Hour thrust her into
dramatic territory she'd mostly avoided over all those years playing
cops, counselors and other character parts: namely, a hot and
heavy makeout scene. At one production meeting, costume designer
Mara Blumenfeld puzzled over the problem of Jones' dress: It had
to be true to the play's 1919 period, but it also had to accommodate
some serious petting by Jones' co-star, Josh Hamilton.
"They were talking about making the skirt so that his hand could
get up underneath it, and I thought, 'I have never had that conversation
before! Holy crap!'" Jones then turns serious: "That's where you
really have to trust the people you're working with." Her trust
in Hamilton was absolute. "He made it so easy for me to just fly
off the handle," she says. "I felt so completely safe."
Jones also developed special relationships with the Our Town
company -- the memory of that show sends her diving into her purse
for Kleenex -- and, according to the director, she built a powerful
connection with the audience as well.
"She has her own special magic -- this thing, which you can't
invent and you can't buy, that says, 'Come along with me,'" explains
William Brown.
This summer Brown will direct Romeo and Juliet for
Summer Shakespeare at Notre Dame. He would have cast Jones in
that had her schedule allowed. "I just think she's a terrific
person and a terrific artist," Brown says. The fact that she hasn't
been able to extend her success to film and television, as other
Chicago-bred actors have done, is more a reflection of Hollywood's
limitations than of hers, he says.
"Unless you're 19, blonde and a size 2, it's going to take a
while for people to get you," Brown says. "Ora Jones is just gorgeous,
but not in the way you see on Friends." For now at least,
Jones is content to be the actor Chicago turns to when there's
a job to be done.
"I really just like working. I really do. You get to learn things
-- that's the big fun of it," she says. "Acting is not about standing
on stage and saying, 'Look at me; I'm brilliant.' It isn't about
you. . . . You do all this to tell a story."
* * *
Julie York Coppens, who covers the fine and performing arts
for the South Bend (Indiana) Tribune, will become
the theater writer for the Charlotte (North Carolina)
Observer this spring.
(April 2004)
