Out, Brief Candle: 15 Singular James Earl Jones Stage Performances
Posted on September 12, 2024
by Eric P
When a film or TV actor passes away, they leave behind a stable and enduring record of their work – reels and tapes and discs and bytes preserving their oeuvre until the end of time or until the streaming services decide to remove their titles from the catalog for no apparent reason.
But a theatre actor’s art is ephemeral; it evaporates into memory as soon as the curtain falls on closing night. Each individual performance is an irreplicable experience shared only whoever was in the audience in that room on that date.
A lot of actors, like the late James Earl Jones – who died September 9 at the age of 93 – did both film and television; future generations will always be able to access his power and subtlety in works as diverse as Star Wars, Matewan, Sneakers, and – well, we all make mistakes – Soul Man. But he was also a powerhouse in the American theatre; not for nothing did they name a Broadway house after him. It was in fact his undeniable force as a stage performer that propelled him to movie stardom – his Tony-winning performance in Howard Sackler’s 1968 boxing play The Great White Hope led to his Oscar-nominated performance in the film version.
Jones must have enjoyed the rush of live performance because he never stopped doing theatre even after his movie paychecks got bigger; he continued to appear on Broadway through 2015 when he did D.L. Coburn’s The Gin Game with Cecily Tyson.
Probably because he was so good at it. There’s no way to capture the electricity of a great live theatre performance but you can get a sense of Jones’s dynamism in this video snippet that’s been circulating since news of his death: a glimpse into the astonishingly great work he did originating the iconic role of Troy Maxson in August Wilson’s Fences.
In the absence of more video artifacts like that, consider reading some of the plays Jones performed during his triumphant career. Imagine the text embodied by that imposing silhouette and articulated in that inimitable baritone.
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