NEW YORK � When Cherry Jones met Doug Hughes for dinner several months ago at a restaurant in the West Village, its wasn't just to break bread. Each had an agenda.
Hughes, the Tony Award-winning director, wanted to lure Jones back to Broadway with his version of the George Bernard Shaw play "Mrs. Warren's Profession." Jones, the Tony Award-winning actress, was being coy.
"He took me out to dinner and I didn't know which way I was going to go. It was going to be the first time I was going to be back on stage in four years," she says during a joint interview with Hughes.
"I'd had little birds in my ear saying, 'Oh, you should hold out for something stark and modern and shocking or whatever.' I was trying to give everything its due. And we sat down."
The two had a fertile history. They first worked together in 2003 in a New York Theater Workshop production of "Flesh and Blood." The next time, each walked away with 2005 Tonys � she for her portrayal of Sister Aloysius in "Doubt" and he for directing her.
Then again, Jones didn't have a good personal history with the Shaw's play. She recalled once being so bored by watching a staging of "Mrs. Warren's Profession" years ago that she walked out in the middle of it.
"There was something about it that lacked charm. And this play has charm � should have some charm. It has broad comedy at times and Greek tragedy at times," says Jones, who was last on Broadway in 2006's "Faith Healer."
"I should qualify that by saying I was falling in love at that moment and it was a first date. I found my sweetheart's eyes more compelling than 'Mrs. Warren's Profession.'"
But Hughes was smitten in his own way. He had first read "Mrs. Warren's Profession" in his 20s and had lobbied the Roundabout Theatre Company to stage it on Broadway for the first time since 1976.
"I always found it a play with a real beating heart," he says.
It centers on a proper Victorian-era young woman who is stunned to learn that her comfortable life has been paid for by her mother's business enterprise: running brothels in Europe. Not only is her mother, Kitty Warren, unrepentant about this income, she's rather proud of her ability to earn a good wage.
Shaw's play was an attempt to expose the hypocrisy of genteel society and the ugliness of capitalism. It worked: So shocking was the play that it was banned from being performed for many years.
When Jones and Hughes met for that fateful dinner, the actress had already reread the play while in Los Angeles shooting TV's "24" � playing President Allison Taylor � and knew that Hughes was probably going to offer her the meaty part of Kitty Warren.
"I read the first three pages and I went, 'This is just fantastic,'" she says. "I hadn't gotten to play anything like this, and at almost 54, I'm ready for these gals now. I thought, 'Who would be more fun to start this next era with than Kitty Warren?' Especially after 708 performances as a nun. To go from an old nun to an old whore? Heaven! Heaven! Heaven!"
Even so, she couldn't let Hughes know that. She wanted to make him work for it.
"I had to chat up the virtues of this part a little bit with Cherry," he says.
"Yeah, it took a minute," she says, laughing. "He basically sat down and said to me, 'This is a brilliant play.' I said, 'It is. I'm in.'"
"It was before the food came," he says.
"It was before we even ordered," she says, rolling her eyes.
Now reunited, the duo clearly share a comfortable friendship and mutual respect. They're both the same age and each worked in regional theater before launching strong Broadway careers.
"It got off to a good start and it's gotten even better," says Hughes.
Todd Haimes, artistic director of the Roundabout, agrees, calling Jones "a force of nature on stage" and Hughes a director "who can tackle these big classic plays and wrangle them." The two in "Mrs. Warren's Profession," he says, have "found the humor in it and I think they made it surprisingly contemporary."
Working together now for the third time has its advantages. "I think because both of us are polite to a fault, after six years, we can actually be a little franker with each other. And we save a little time," he says.
"Doug knows that I'm slow: I just have to marinate for a long time with a part," says Jones. "But I know Doug knows that about me and I always feel Doug's faith that somehow it will get better."
Hughes, on the other hand, is anything but slow. He's actually more like a workaholic, having directed nine Broadway shows alone since 2004. Jones gently chided him when she won her Tony for "Doubt," telling him from the podium that "every actor in New York wants to work with you, so pace yourself, please."
"He hasn't," she says now, archly.
"I suppose it's a good man's failing, but it is a failing," Hughes says sadly. But then he admits he is already rehearsing another play, "Elling," with Brendan Fraser.
"We should have an intervention any minute now," Jones says.
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Online:
http://roundabouttheatre.org