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    Emmys In Memoriam Segment Pays Tribute to Matthew Perry and Norman Lear

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    The Emmys paid tribute to the actors, writers and producers who died since the last awards, taking an extra beat to honor Norman Lear, the famed TV writer and producer who died last month at 101.The in memoriam segment recognized two television actors who died unexpectedly: Andre Braugher, who was known for his roles on “Homicide: Life on the Street” and “Brooklyn Nine-Nine”; and Matthew Perry, the “Friends” star. (The musical accompaniment, from the duo the War and Treaty and Charlie Puth, included the “Friends” theme song.)Here are other members of the television industry who the program recognized:Angela Lansbury, the famed actress who starred in “Murder, She Wrote.”Angus Cloud, who portrayed a lovable drug dealer on the HBO show “Euphoria.”Barbara Walters, the pioneering TV news reporter.Bob Barker, the longtime host of “The Price Is Right.”David Jacobs, who created the soap opera “Dallas.”Harry Belafonte, the barrier-breaking performer in music, movies and TV.Leslie Jordan, the comic actor who was a cast member on “Will & Grace.”Mark Margolis, who played a fearsome former drug lord in “Breaking Bad.”Paul Reubens, the comic actor behind Pee-wee Herman.Richard Roundtree, the prolific actor who had recurring roles in “Heroes,” “Being Mary Jane” and “Family Reunion.”Ron Cephas Jones, who won two Emmys for his role on “This Is Us.”Stephen Boss, the dancer and reality star known as tWitch.Suzanne Somers, who gained fame on the hit sitcom “Three’s Company” before building a health and diet business empire. More

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      The Artists We Lost in 2023, in Their Words

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      The many creative people who died this year built their wisdom over lives generously long or much too short, through times of peace and periods of conflict. Their ideas, perspectives and humanity helped shape our own: in language spoken, written or left unsaid; in notes hit, lines delivered, boundaries pushed. Here is a tribute to just some of them, in their voices.“I never considered giving up on my dreams. You could say I had an invincible optimism.”— Tina Turner, musician, born 1939 (Read the obituary.)“Hang on to your fantasies, whatever they are and however dimly you may hear them, because that’s what you’re worth.”— David Del Tredici, composer, born 1937 (Read the obituary.)“Ever since I can remember, I have danced for the sheer joy of moving.”— Rena Gluck, dancer and choreographer, born 1933 (Read the obituary.)“The stage is not magic for me. It never was. I always felt the audience was waiting to see that first drop of blood.”— Lynn Seymour, dancer, born 1939 (Read the obituary.)Paul Reubens.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images“Most questions that are asked of me about Pee-wee Herman I don’t have a clue on. I’ve always been very careful not to dissect it too much for myself.”— Paul Reubens, actor, born 1952 (Read the obituary.)“If you know your voice really well, if you’ve become friends with your vocal apparatus, you know which roles you can sing and which you shouldn’t even touch.”— Grace Bumbry, opera singer, born 1937 (Read the obituary.)“Actors should approach an audition (and indeed, their careers) with the firm belief that they have something to offer that is unique. Treasure who you are and what you bring to the audition.”— Joanna Merlin, actress, born 1931 (Read the obituary.)Glenda Jackson.Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images“If I have my health and strength, I’m going to be the most appalling old lady. I’m going to boss everyone about, make people stand up for me when I come into a room, and generally capitalize on all the hypocrisy that society shows towards the old.”— Glenda Jackson, actress and politician, born 1936 (Read the obituary.)“I don’t see myself as a pioneer. I see myself as a working guy and that’s all, and that is enough.”— William Friedkin, filmmaker, born 1935 (Read the obituary.)“Some people, every day you get up and chop wood, and some people write songs.”— Robbie Robertson, musician, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)“I wasn’t brought up in Hollywood. I was brought up in a kibbutz.”— Topol, actor, born 1935 (Read the obituary.)Jimmy Buffett.Michael Putland/Getty Images“I don’t play at my audience. I play for my audience.”— Jimmy Buffett, musician, born 1946 (Read the obituary.)“I’m still not a natural in front of people. I’m shy. I’m a hermit. But I’m learning a little more.”— Andre Braugher, actor, born 1962 (Read the obituary.)“Some poets do not see reaching many in spatial terms, as in the filled auditorium. They see reaching many temporally, sequentially, many over time, into the future, but in some profound way these readers always come singly, one by one.”— Louise Glück, poet, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)“I paint because I believe it’s the best way that I can pass my time as a human being. I paint for myself. I paint for my wife. And I paint for anybody that’s willing to look at it.”— Brice Marden, artist, born 1938 (Read the obituary.)“Writing is about generosity, passing on to other people what you’ve had the misfortune of having to find out for yourself.”— Fay Weldon, author, born 1931 (Read the obituary.)Ryuichi Sakamoto.Ian Dickson/Redferns, via Getty Images“I went to see one of those pianos drowned in tsunami water near Fukushima, and recorded it. Of course, it was totally out of tune, but I thought it was beautiful. I thought, ‘Nature tuned it.’”— Ryuichi Sakamoto, composer, born 1952 (Read the obituary.)“I hate everything that is natural, and I love the artificial.”— Vera Molnar, artist, born 1924 (Read the obituary.)“A roof could be a roof, but it also could be a little garden.”— Rafael Viñoly, architect, born 1944 (Read the obituary.)“True architecture is life.”— Balkrishna Doshi, architect, born 1927 (Read the obituary.)Sinead O’Connor.Duane Braley/Star Tribune, via Getty Images“Words are dreadfully powerful, and words uttered are 10 times more powerful. The spoken word is the science on which the entire universe is built.”— Sinead O’Connor, musician, born 1966 (Read the obituary.)“Before I can put anything in the world, I have to wait at least a couple of years and edit them. Nothing is going out that hasn’t been edited a dozen times.”— Robert Irwin, artist, born 1928 (Read the obituary.)“An editor is a reader who edits.”— Robert Gottlieb, editor and author, born 1931 (Read the obituary.)Matthew Perry.Reisig & Taylor/NBCUniversal, via Getty Images“Sometimes I think I went through the addiction, alcoholism and fame all to be doing what I’m doing right now, which is helping people.”— Matthew Perry, actor, born 1969 (Read the obituary.)“It was the period of apartheid. You know, it was very hard, very difficult and very painful — and many a time I felt, ‘Shall I continue with this life or shall I go on?’ But I continued. I wanted to dance.”— Johaar Mosaval, dancer, born 1928 (Read the obituary.)“God would like us to be joyful / Even when our hearts lie panting on the floor.” (“Fiddler on the Roof”)— Sheldon Harnick, lyricist, born 1924 (Read the obituary.)“I remember back in the day, saying it’s so cool that the Beatles, Stevie Wonder, David Bowie are still played. That’s what we wanted hip-hop to be.”— David Jolicoeur, musician, born 1968 (Read the obituary.)“Civilization cannot last or advance without culture.”— Ahmad Jamal, musician, born 1930 (Read the obituary.)Harry Belafonte. Phil Burchman/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images“Movements don’t die because struggle doesn’t die.”— Harry Belafonte, singer and actor, born 1927 (Read the obituary.)“Some people say to artists that they should change. Change what? It’s like saying, ‘Why don’t you walk differently or talk differently?’ I can’t change my voice. That’s the way I am.”— Fernando Botero, artist, born 1932 (Read the obituary.)“Performing is my way of being part of humanity — of sharing.”— André Watts, pianist, born 1946 (Read the obituary.)Renata Scotto.Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images“Singing isn’t my whole life.”— Renata Scotto, opera singer, born 1934 (Read the obituary.)“It’s through working on characters in plays that I’ve learned about myself, about how people operate.”— Frances Sternhagen, actress, born 1930 (Read the obituary.)David Crosby.Mick Gold/Redferns, via Getty Images“I don’t know if I’ve found my way, but I do know I feel happy.”— David Crosby, musician, born 1941 (Read the obituary.)“I’m very abstract. Once it becomes narrative, it’s all over. Let the audience decide what it’s about.”— Rudy Perez, choreographer, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)“I don’t have a driven desire actually to be in the act of writing. But my response to any form of excitement about reading is to want to write.”— A.S. Byatt, author, born 1936 (Read the obituary.)“I don’t think I ever wrote music to react to other music — I really had a very strong need to express myself.”— Kaija Saariaho, composer, born 1952 (Read the obituary.)Richard Roundtree.Celeste Sloman for The New York Times“Narrow-mindedness is alien to me.”— Richard Roundtree, actor, born 1942, though some sources say 1937 (Read the obituary.)“The reason I’ve been able to dance for so long is absolute willpower.”— Gus Solomons Jr., dancer and choreographer, born 1938 (Read the obituary.)“My practice is a resistance to the glamorous art object.”— Phyllida Barlow, artist, born 1944 (Read the obituary.)“My lifetime ambition has been to unite the utmost seriousness of question with the utmost lightness of form.”— Milan Kundera, author, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)Mary Quant.Hulton Archive/Getty Images“The most extreme fashion should be very, very cheap. First, because only the young are daring enough to wear it; second, because the young look better in it; and third, because if it’s extreme enough, it shouldn’t last.”— Mary Quant, fashion designer, born 1930 (Read the obituary.)“I spontaneously enter the unknown.”— Vivan Sundaram, artist, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)“The goal is to wander, wander through the unknown in search of the unknown, all the while leaving your mark.”— Richard Hunt, artist, born 1935 (Read the obituary.)Angus Cloud.Pat Martin for The New York Times“Style is how you hold yourself.”— Angus Cloud, actor, born 1998 (Read the obituary.)“I have an aura.”— Barry Humphries, actor, born 1934 (Read the obituary.)“Intensity is not something I try to do. It’s just kind of the way that I am.”— Lance Reddick, actor, born 1962 (Read the obituary.)Alan Arkin.Jerry Mosey/Associated Press“There was a time when I had so little sense of myself that getting out of my skin and being anybody else was a sigh of relief. But I kind of like myself now, a lot of the times.”— Alan Arkin, actor, born 1934 (Read the obituary.)“I have always thought of myself as a kind of vessel through which the work might flow.”— Valda Setterfield, dancer, born 1934 (Read the obituary.)“You spend a lot of time thinking about how to write a book, you probably shouldn’t be talking about it. You probably should be doing it.”— Cormac McCarthy, author, born 1933 (Read the obituary.)Elliott Erwitt.Steven Siewert/Fairfax Media, via Getty Images“In general, I don’t think too much. I certainly don’t use those funny words museum people and art critics like.”— Elliott Erwitt, photographer, born 1928 (Read the obituary.)“Every morning we leave more in the bed: certainty, vigor, past loves. And hair, and skin: dead cells. This ancient detritus was nonetheless one move ahead of you, making its humorless own arrangements to rejoin the cosmos.” (“The Information”)— Martin Amis, author, born 1949 (Read the obituary.)Magda Saleh.Vincent Tullo for The New York Times“I did not do it on my own.”— Magda Saleh, ballerina, born 1944 (Read the obituary.)“The word ‘jazz,’ to me, only means, ‘I dare you.’”— Wayne Shorter, musician, born 1933 (Read the obituary.)“What is a jazz singer? Somebody who improvises? But I don’t: I prefer simplicity.”— Astrud Gilberto, singer, born 1940 (Read the obituary.)“It’s who you are when time’s up that matters.”— Anne Perry, author, born 1938 (Read the obituary.)“When I think about my daughter and the day that I move on — there is a piece of me that will remain with her.”— Ron Cephas Jones, actor, born 1957 (Read the obituary.)“Let us encourage one another with visions of a shared future. And let us bring all the grit and openheartedness and creative spirit we can muster to gather together and build that future.”— Norman Lear, television writer and producer, born 1922 (Read the obituary.)Tony Bennett.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images“Life teaches you how to live it if you live long enough.”— Tony Bennett, musician, born 1926 (Read the obituary.)Photographs at top via Getty Images. More

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      Ron Cephas Jones, Emmy Winner for ‘This Is Us,’ Dies at 66

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      After facing homelessness in his youth, he became an admired theater and television actor, playing tough and weathered but vulnerable characters.Ron Cephas Jones, an admired actor in New York theater and on several television shows, including “This Is Us,” a family drama for which he won two Emmy Awards — drawing on his troubled youth of drug addiction and temporary homelessness for inspiration — has died. He was 66.The writer and creator of “This Is Us,” Dan Fogelman, posted about Mr. Jones’s death on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. Mr. Jones’s manager, Dan Spilo, told The Associated Press that Mr. Jones died from “a longstanding pulmonary issue,” but did not specify where and when he died.Mr. Jones received a double-lung transplant in 2020, after years of living with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.Ron Cephas Jones in 2021. Though he gained fame and two Emmy Awards for his work on television, he said, “My whole life has been the stage.”Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesMr. Jones was known for playing characters who, like him, wrenched from past experiences of personal desperation a hard-won toughness and emotional vulnerability.On “This Is Us,” which ran on NBC from 2016 until last year and featured appearances from Mr. Jones in every season, he frequently made speeches. He played William “Shakespeare” Hill, a former drug addict with terminal cancer who connects at the end of his life with a son, Randall Pearson (played by Sterling K. Brown), whom he had left outside a fire station at birth.“On a series with no shortage of weepy story lines, William is a figure of singular pathos,” Reggie Ugwu wrote in a 2021 profile of Mr. Jones for The Times, adding, “But Jones’s soulful performance — the weather-beaten brow, the voice like brushed wool — confers a lived-in texture and depth.”Mr. Jones told the Hollywood news site Gold Derby in 2017, “I realized that so much of the man is inside of me, and my history.”For “This Is Us,” Mr. Jones received Emmy nominations for outstanding supporting actor in a drama series in 2017 and outstanding guest actor in a drama series in 2018, 2019 and 2020. He won the guest actor award in 2018 and 2020.His most recent star turn in the theater was in “Clyde’s,” which was written by Lynn Nottage and ran on Broadway from the fall of 2021 to the winter of 2022. It concerned a crew of ex-convicts working as sandwich makers at a truck stop. Mr. Jones played Montrellous, an elder of the group who finds a passion in his job that inspires his beleaguered colleagues.The Times called Mr. Jones “the show’s transfixing center of gravity,” capable of blending “Zen imperturbability with subtle dashes of pain and sacrifice.” He was nominated for a Tony Award for best featured actor in a play and won awards from the Drama Desk and the Drama League.In 2012, Mr. Jones played the lead in a production of Shakespeare’s “Richard III” by the Public Theater that appeared in prisons and homeless shelters in addition to the company’s base near Astor Place in Manhattan.“No character in Shakespeare is as hungry for power as Richard III,” Charles Isherwood wrote in a review for The Times. “And it’s hard to think of an actor with a naturally hungrier look than Ron Cephas Jones, the tall, beanpole-thin, snakelike actor who portrays the title character.”Mr. Isherwood said Mr. Jones made “a strikingly sinister-looking Richard” and described his depiction of Richard’s mendacity as “hypnotically persuasive.”Characterizing Mr. Jones’s place in the theater world, The Times labeled him in 2012 “a stalwart New York actor” equally comfortable playing Othello or Caliban as he was playing a serial killer in a contemporary drama set on Rikers Island.Mr. Jones, right, as Caliban in the 2010 Bridge Project production of “The Tempest” at the BAM Harvey. With him are Anthony O’Donnell, left, as Trinculo and Thomas Sadoski as Stephano.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRon Cephas Jones was born on Jan. 8, 1957, in Paterson, N.J., where he grew up. He graduated from Ramapo College with a theater degree in 1978. In his youth, he had gone to Harlem to see jazz shows and plays, and he returned to New York after graduating to find a place in the art scene. He developed a heroin addiction that stalled his ambitions.He attempted to get clean during a series of moves and career changes — for four years, he was a bus driver in Los Angeles — but for a long time, nothing stuck. At one point he was arrested with 10 small bags of heroin and, he told The Times in 2021, he barely escaped serving a five-year prison sentence.He relapsed again and again, eventually prompting his mother to stop answering his phone calls. In the mid-1980s, he slept on a bench in Paterson’s Eastside Park. An uncle invited Mr. Jones to stay with him at his Harlem apartment. In 1986, he succeeded in sobering up. In 1990, he starred in his first play, “Don’t Explain” by Samuel B. Harps, at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.He had a daughter, Jasmine Cephas Jones, in 1989 with the jazz singer Kim Lesley. Ms. Jones also became a successful actress. In the original 2015 Broadway production of “Hamilton,” she played Peggy Schuyler, Alexander Hamilton’s sister-in-law, and Maria Reynolds, his mistress. In 2020, she won an Emmy for her role in the web series “#FreeRayshawn.” In 2021, she and Mr. Jones announced the Emmy nominations together.Mr. Jones with his daughter, Jasmine Cephas Jones, in 2021 at the series premiere of “Blindspotting,” in which she appeared.Chris Delmas/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesA complete list of survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Jones smoked two packs a day for most of his life, and he kept smoking even after his emphysema diagnosis.“I was in total denial,” he told The Times in 2021. “I told myself that it would pass, or that I was just getting older. I was afraid and didn’t want to change what I wasn’t ready to change.”Other TV shows in which he made notable appearances include “Mr. Robot,” “Luke Cage” and “Lisey’s Story.” New York Times reviews of his theater work were usually enthusiastic. In 2012, Mr. Isherwood called him “commandingly grave” in John Patrick Shanley’s play “Storefront Church,” and in 2015, Laura Collins-Hughes described his performance as Prospero in “The Tempest” as “moving” and “understated.”“He moves through the world like a cool jazz man, but is also generous and a nurturer,” Ms. Nottage told The Times in 2021. “The same qualities that he brings to his acting are the qualities that he embodies in real life.”He managed to evoke that sensibility in Ms. Nottage’s play despite having recently spent two months in the hospital recovering from his lung surgery.“My whole life has been the stage,” Mr. Jones told The Times. “The idea of not performing again seemed worse to me than death.” More

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      After ‘Clyde’s,’ Lynn Nottage Just Has Two Shows Onstage. ‘Whew!’

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      With one play closed, Nottage can focus on “MJ” on Broadway and “Intimate Apparel” at Lincoln Center Theater. And maybe even catch her breath.It was just a flute of champagne after Sunday’s final Broadway performance of her play “Clyde’s,” but Lynn Nottage was genuinely happy to have it — not only to toast the end of the limited run with the rest of the company, upstairs at the Hayes Theater, but also to sneak a brief, rare moment of indulgence in a schedule that’s lately been too crammed for a glass of wine.Starring Uzo Aduba as the owner of a sandwich shop staffed with people who have served time, and Ron Cephas Jones as a culinary artist who leads the workers in a quest for the perfect sandwich, “Clyde’s” started a remarkable season for Nottage, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner. For four days this month, until “Clyde’s” closed, she had three new shows onstage in New York; the others, still in previews, are the Broadway musical “MJ,” about Michael Jackson, and the opera “Intimate Apparel,” adapted from her play of the same name, at Lincoln Center Theater.For months she shuttled among them, dashing back to “Clyde’s” for talkbacks and to catch performances when understudies went on. All while teaching full time at Columbia University and, in October, releasing the short film “Takeover,” produced by her company Market Road Films, for the Op-Docs series of The New York Times.Nottage shares a toast with actors and staff after the final performance of “Clyde’s” at the Hayes Theater.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesAfter the champagne toast on Sunday evening, Nottage came downstairs for an interview in a lounge at the theater to talk about her season and about “Clyde’s,” which she called “Floyd’s” when it had its premiere in Minneapolis in 2019, and renamed following the killing of George Floyd in 2020. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.So how are you?I’m very overworked. [laughs] I was just describing this particular moment as like making art in the eye of a hurricane.You’ve decided to make a lot of art in the eye of a hurricane.It’s a lot of art, yeah. It’s the moment in which I was invited to make art, but it’s also the most difficult, fraught, complicated moment in theater history. It would be stressful, you know, making three shows without the added element of Covid. But add that sort of special ingredient, and it’s very complicated.Are you getting the time to savor this?I started rehearsal in October for both shows, “MJ” and “Clyde’s.” From October to December, I was rehearsing and teching and seeing the shows at night, and teaching full time at Columbia. I did not have a single day off. And then in mid-December, we began rehearsals for “Intimate Apparel.” But strangely, in the Covid shutdown, when for 10 days we didn’t have “MJ” going, I suddenly had just a little bit of a pause. I could breathe.Is there joy in it?This is the dream. I feel immensely proud of all three of the works of art that I have created. They’re so different and they represent different aspects of who I am as an artist in different parts of my brain. Part of the joy of making all three of these pieces of art at the same time is that it allows me to leave one space and enter another completely different space and then, you know, leave that space and enter another one. And so I never get bored.A curtain call, from left, with Edmund Donovan, Ron Cephas Jones, Uzo Aduba, Kara Young and Reza Salazar.Jeenah Moon for The New York Times“Clyde’s” is a comedy.It is a comedy. It’s also a feel-good play. And particularly at this moment I think that audiences need something that is healing and soothing, and that allows them to open up their hearts and allow laughter in. And that’s what I was hoping to do.It was a long journey with this play, yes?It doesn’t seem like a super long journey to me. This journey was just interrupted because of world circumstances. We’ve been through a lot. The world changed in ways that now seem incomprehensible to me. I mean, I kind of can’t believe that we lived through it. I’ll be an old lady with my grandchildren, like: “Yes, let me tell you about Covid and Donald Trump.” [laughs] You know, it’s sort of similar when I think about my grandmother talking about the Depression and the war, and it just seemed like, “How did you survive?” Now I know.Did you think that when you finally got to do “Clyde’s,” we would be out of the pandemic?I think all of us thought that. There was a moment of incredible optimism. And still, when we began “Clyde’s,” we had all of the Covid protocols in place and the Covid officer, and we wore masks throughout rehearsals and the actors were permitted to take off the masks on the stage. And that felt like a victory, like, OK, we’re moving through this difficult moment. And audiences were coming back and you’d walk through this theater district and it felt vibrant and alive. And you know, there were sprinklings of tourists, and restaurants were packed. You couldn’t get reservations.I think that something like “Clyde’s” in any other climate would have been a hit, and it would have continued to run. We always had a limited run, and we ran through that period of time. But I think that any other time, we could have kept going. It just kind of breaks my heart to make something that I feel is connecting with audiences in a moment in which audiences feel reluctant to come to theater. But for us, I think one of the real positive notes is that we were able to simulcast.Nottage strolls with Kate Whoriskey, right, the director of “Clyde’s.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesTell me about that.We became sort of the beta test for Broadway. Like, can this concept work? Can you do live theater that’s projected into people’s living rooms and people actually tune in and have an experience? And what we discovered is, yes. So many people who were either fearful to come to the theater, or had Covid and couldn’t come to the theater, bought tickets and had an experience that wasn’t live in the fact that their bodies were in the theater and they were exchanging energy with the actors, but it still had the kind of spontaneity, because they didn’t know what was going to happen. I think it’s going to be an interesting bonanza for theater.How different is your experience of this season from a normal season?Under normal circumstances, after shows you go out for drinks with people. There’s a real sense of community. You see people from other shows. You feel really very much part of a season. But here, every show is an island because of Covid. People do the show and they go home.Where did you get your work ethic?It’s fear. It’s fear that it may all go away. There was a moment in my life in which my father had an accident which didn’t permit him to work, and my mother, who was a schoolteacher, suddenly had to support the entire family. And I saw how hard she worked and I thought, Oh my God, that could happen to me. You know, that any moment your circumstances can change. And you find yourself in dire straits. And I thought, OK, I’m just not going to let that happen.How old were you then?I was maybe 11 or 12.By now, the fear can’t be about being in dire straits. Can it really?Yeah, I mean, it’s not rational. [laughs] It just is a fact.But I’ve always worked. This is why I think I write about working people — that’s what I do.Nottage leaves a message on the wall at the Hayes Theater.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesSo now that you’ll be slacking with just two shows in previews —With just two shows, it’s like, whew! But teaching begins again next week. And they want us to teach remotely, and I have a class that’s not a remote class. It really is about being immersed in experiences. I’m like, what am I going to do?I have to figure it out, but I don’t have time to figure it out. I’m like, OK, tomorrow morning I will wake up and from 7 to 8:30, I’ll figure it out. More

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      in Television

      Ron Cephas Jones Has Something to Prove Again

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      The Emmy-winning “This Is Us” actor received a double-lung transplant after a secret battle with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Now he’s back onstage in “Clyde’s” on Broadway.In the spring of 2020, a recurring nightmare began tormenting the actor Ron Cephas Jones. A theater veteran known for his work on the NBC drama “This Is Us,” Jones is 64 and wiry, with short waves of black hair and an almond-shaped face. In the dream, he is delivering a monologue onstage — darkened room, white backlights — when he notices something amiss. Everyone in the audience is looking elsewhere, in seemingly every direction but his. Jones waves and shouts, trying to draw the crowd’s attention. But no matter how desperately he screams, no one registers his presence. He is there but not there, a ghost among the living.In the new Broadway play “Clyde’s,” where Jones plays a kind of spiritual leader to a beleaguered crew of recently incarcerated sandwich cooks, he is the show’s transfixing center of gravity — the very opposite of ghostly incorporeality. But when the nightmares began, Jones really was in mortal peril.In May of last year, he received a double-lung transplant after years of suffering in secret from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Jones spent nearly two months at the Ronald Reagan U.C.L.A. Medical Center in Los Angeles on and off a ventilator, learning to breathe and then eat and then walk again. The hope of one day returning to the theater was the fire that fueled his recovery.Uzo Aduba as Clyde and Jones as Montrellous in Lynn Nottage’s new comedy, “Clyde’s,” in which ex-convicts working at a truck-stop sandwich shop dream of remaking their lives.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“My whole life has been the stage,” Jones said recently, over lunch at a restaurant a few blocks from the theater where “Clyde’s” is running. “The idea of not performing again seemed worse to me than death.”Jones is the kind of actor who works like chipotle mayo — you don’t always think to look for him, but you’re happy when he shows up. About six years ago, after three decades of working on and off Broadway in New York, he began quietly lending credence to a crop of ambitious streaming-era dramas. He added a touch of warmth to Sam Esmail’s “Mr. Robot,” a note of vulnerability to Marvel’s “Luke Cage,” a foreboding undercurrent to Stephen King’s “Lisey’s Story.” But his biggest breakthrough — and two Emmy Awards, for outstanding guest actor — came from the ratings smash “This Is Us,” where Jones has played William, the biological father of Sterling K. Brown’s character, Randall, since 2016.On a series with no shortage of weepy story lines, William is a figure of singular pathos. The character, who is Black, bisexual, a former drug addict, an absentee father and has terminal cancer, would in lesser hands strain the limits of good taste. But Jones’s soulful performance — the weather-beaten brow, the voice like brushed wool — confers a lived-in texture and depth.The same year that Jones was cast as William, he complained to his doctor about difficulty breathing. An X-ray confirmed advanced emphysema, a pulmonary condition in which damage to the lungs deprives the blood of oxygen. Jones, who had been a two-packs-a-day smoker for most of his life, was told the disease was progressive — left untreated, his lungs would grow weaker and eventually collapse. He was advised to consider a transplant. But he shut down the idea after learning the risks involved. Even if his body accepted the new lungs, there was a 31 percent chance he would be permanently bound to an oxygen tank.From left, Jones, Bob Dishy, Tonya Pinkins and Zach Grenier in “Storefront Church,” about Bronx residents whose lives become tangled in unexpected ways, at the Atlantic Theater Company in 2012.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“I was in total denial,” Jones said. “I told myself that it would pass, or that I was just getting older. I was afraid and didn’t want to change what I wasn’t ready to change.”For a year after his diagnosis, Jones continued smoking up to 12 cigarettes a day. He finally changed course in 2017, after an incident on the set of “This Is Us.” While filming a long outdoor scene with Susan Kelechi Watson, who plays William’s daughter-in-law, Jones became increasingly short of breath. He sensed his heart pounding and broke into a sweat. He felt as if he were underwater. After someone called an ambulance, an emergency responder resuscitated him using an oxygen tank. Denial was no longer an option.“You can see in his eyes that he made the right decision,” said the actress Jasmine Cephas Jones, Jones’s daughter and an original cast member of “Hamilton.” “I feel like I have my dad back.”Many of Jones’s characters, including Montrellous, the ex-convict he portrays in “Clyde’s,” are pacific, hard-luck men in pursuit of redemption. The playwright Lynn Nottage, who met Jones in the 2000s when both were members of the Labyrinth Theater Company, said she wrote Montrellous with Jones in mind.“He moves through the world like a cool jazz man, but is also generous and a nurturer,” Nottage said. “The same qualities that he brings to his acting are the qualities that he embodies in real life.”Jones at the Helen Hayes Theater, where “Clyde’s” is running through Jan. 16.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesJones was first drawn to performance as a young man during the Black Arts Movement in the 1970s. Born and raised in Paterson, N.J., he took Route 4 to Harlem on weekends to see jazz at St. Nick’s Pub, or plays at the National Black Theater or Avery Fisher Hall (now David Geffen Hall) at Lincoln Center. After graduating with a theater degree from Ramapo College, in 1978, Jones immersed himself in the art scene in New York but was derailed when he developed a crippling heroin addiction. Encouraged by his mother, he moved to Los Angeles for a fresh start and spent four years working as a bus driver.Eventually, Jones turned to gambling and relapsed. He said he was arrested with 10 small bags of heroin and narrowly escaped a five-year prison sentence. A judge sent him back East — to a rehabilitation center in Albany, N.Y. — but the program didn’t take. Jones relapsed a second and third time. His mother, who had taken him in after Albany, kicked him out of the house and stopped answering his phone calls.“It was the tough love thing,” Jones said. “But it felt like everything I had loved was gone.”Jones hit rock bottom and said that for a while he slept on a bench in Eastside Park in Paterson. He was saved by an uncle who invited him to stay at his apartment in Harlem. It was there, in 1986, that he got clean for the last time.Jones and David Zayas in “Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train.” Stephen Adly Guirgis’s portrait of lives behind bars debuted at the East 13th Street Theater in 2000.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn 1990, he starred in his first play, “Don’t Explain” by Samuel B. Harps, at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe on the Lower East Side. By then he was a father — Jasmine was born in 1989 — and went on to a wide-ranging stage career, starring in Stephen Adly Guirgis’s “Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train,” John Patrick Shanley’s “Storefront Church” and “Richard III.”“Clyde’s” is his first appearance on Broadway in seven years. After his lung transplant, Jones was determined to prove that he could still perform at the highest level, and for the standard eight shows per week. In his review of the play for The Times, Jesse Green wrote that Jones perfectly embodies his character, balancing a “Zen imperturbability with subtle dashes of pain and sacrifice.”“It was kind of miraculous to see him up there so full-bodied,” said Nottage, who, though aware of Jones’s operation, said it was never discussed during rehearsals this summer. “You would never know that he had any kind of struggle.”“Clyde’s” opens with a monologue, in which Montrellous attempts to persuade Clyde, played by Uzo Aduba, to change the menu at her restaurant. On opening night late last month, when the curtain lifted and revealed a packed crowd, including many of Jones’s friends and family, he said he was so overcome with emotion that he nearly screamed his first line.“I was so eager that all of the air from my diaphragm just came rushing out at once,” he said. “I wanted to make sure that I could be heard.” More