'She's become the first lady of the stage'

CHICAGO -- During the rehearsals for "Doubt, " Cherry Jones began to get a funny feeling. "I remember thinking, 'We're going to have these jobs longer than we thought.' "

That was in fall 2004. Now Jones is sitting on a couch in the apartment she's staying in during the Chicago run of the national tour of the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, which opens at the Colonial Theatre on Tuesday.

"It's a great play to do over and over," she says with a big, beamy smile.

Jones ought to know. She's played Sister Aloysius , the drama's indomitable protagonist, close to 600 times: off-Broadway (winning an Obie), on Broadway (winning a Tony), and now on the road. The tour started in Los Angeles last September and ends in Philadelphia this May.

"I'm going to be tired when it's over," Jones says. "I think Laurette Taylor did 'Peg O' My Heart' 4,000 times or something. I thought, 'No wonder she was an alcoholic!' "

The reference to Taylor, the original Amanda in "The Glass Menagerie " and one of the legendary American stage actresses, is offhand yet fitting. Over the past decade, Jones has acquired a rare stature. The talent that shone so bright ly at the American Repertory Theatre during the '80s has come to full maturity.

"She's become the first lady of the stage; that's what she is," says Robert Brustein , the ART's founding director. "I think she can do anything now."

"Cherry's a real powerhouse," says John Patrick Shanley , the author of "Doubt." "She has this natural personal integrity that shines off the stage."

Shanley credits Jones with filling out his original conception of Aloysius, the flinty principal of a parochial school who in 1964 comes to suspect a charismatic young priest of improper relations with an eighth-grade boy.

"When Cherry came in she certainly had the authority I was looking for," Shanley says. "The luminosity was not something I'd particularly envisioned but when I saw it I said, 'That's great. That's the other half of this character.' She found even more when she went to Broadway."

For all that Jones is on her way to becoming theatrical royalty -- "She certainly is in the line of people like Katherine Cornell and Helen Hayes and Stella Adler ," Brustein says -- there's nothing of the grande dame about her.

Jones has a warm, relaxed manner and a rich, burgundy laugh. It's like a sonic hug. Although she's acted for a living for nearly three decades, Jones still seems a little stage - struck, as smitten with the theater as the 16-year-old who saw Colleen Dewhurst and Jason Robards in a workshop production of "A Moon for the Misbegotten" and never looked back.

"You start as a child, acting," says Jones, who grew up in west Tennessee. Her voice retains the faintest hint of a drawl.

"We'd head out to the woods and play all sorts of scenarios for hours, every single day of my childhood. So there was a real development of one's imagination that way. Then I sort of realized I was kind of good at it and I enjoyed it -- and I loved movies and all the things that allowed me to see others doing it. Then, of course, I wanted to be like them and do it all my life as a grown - up. I don't know how anyone ever wants to do anything else."

Jones got a drama degree at Carnegie Mellon University , in Pittsburgh, then headed to New York to act. After two years of "scooping tuna fish" to support herself, she auditioned for the then-fledgling ART. It was 1980. Jones won the part, Rosalind in "As You Like It ." Another two dozen productions followed.

"I miss Cambridge so much," she says, recalling her studio apartment between Harvard and Porter squares. "It had this wonderful casement window that looked as though Peter Pan could have flown in at any moment. It was one tiny room and I just loved, loved, loved it. It was a wonderful time."

Besides Shakespeare, Jones played in Chekhov , Ibsen , Moliere , Brecht , Shaw , Sheridan . She demonstrated a phenomenal range at ART, something that would serve her well when she went back to New York in the early '90s. Jones won her first Tony for "The Heiress ," based on Henry James 's "Washington Square, " in 1995. Some of her more notable credits include "Angels in America, " "Night of the Iguana, " Brian Friel's "Faith Healer, " and, 30 years after seeing Dewhurst do it, "A Moon for the Misbegotten. "

Jones's range has been essential in "Doubt." Part of the play's impact has to do with its capacity to elicit laughter as well as pain. (Shanley won a Best Original Screenplay Oscar for the 1987 romantic comedy "Moonstruck.")

"The audience doesn't see it coming," Jones says. "They all come in thinking it's going to be this grim play about pedophilia, then they realize it's about human nature. So it's wonderful to be able to disarm them with that.

"It's almost unlike any play I've ever worked on: The relationship with the audience is so palpable and so strong -- at all times. You feel the moment the audience sort of ka-chunks into the play, and it becomes their play. It's no longer ours, it's theirs, and we're there to serve them. And I've never experienced that before with a play."

One of the biggest challenges "Doubt" posed for Jones, who grew up Methodist, was denominational.

"I don't have that DNA of literally centuries of stories of nuns," Jones explains. But Catholic friends strove to make up for that.

"All Catholics love to tell stories about their nuns," Jones says with mounting enthusiasm. "It's unbelievable to me! The first few times I heard those stories I thought they were exaggerating, but after you've heard your 60th or 70th story you start to realize that there's a real pattern here. And there were wonderful nuns and wretched nuns and inspired nuns and demented nuns. I called upon all those stories that I'd heard."

A glint comes into her eyes. "I called upon 'The Sound of Music.' I called upon Rosalind Russell in 'The Trouble with Angels.' Listen, I was pretty shameless with my resource material."

Aloysius is an exhausting part. "Nuns don't sweat, they perspire," Jones deadpans, "and during those 90 minutes this one perspires a lot.

"No more long runs for a while after this," she declares, "though it's the luck of the draw that anyone ever gets to do a long run. I may never have the opportunity to do a long run ever again. That was the beauty of ART: Six weeks, and you were off to the next. Whether it had been brilliant or just dreck, you were able to put it behind you and move on to the next one. You learn so much that way. There are just times when I think I am a regional theater actress. I am not this long-term actress. But with a role like this you have to take advantage of it, because they're so rare in one's career."

Last November, Jones turned 50. That's a perilous age for screen actresses. Stage actresses have more leeway -- think of Swoosie Kurtz , say, or Blythe Danner , Jones's older generational sisters -- but it's a struggle, nonetheless. The one sure thing is that Jones will keep on acting, somewhere, somehow, and as often as possible.

"I jokingly say I can imagine being content playing Anfisa [the maid] in a series of productions of 'The Three Sisters,' " Jones says.

"To get to speak Chekhov and Brecht and Shaw and Shake s peare and O'Neill," she says almost bashfully, "that's been a real turn-on for me, to get to appear insanely articulate and never at a loss. It's very comforting to know the beginning, the middle, and the end of something, and to create an arc. Also, the older I get the more convinced I am that most actors have to be a little obsessive-compulsive. Why else would you choose to do the exact same thing every night of your life?"

Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.