Margo Jones
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Margo Jones (1911-1955), born Margaret Virginia Jones in Livingstone, Texas was an American stage director. Her life's passion was theatre, and she is credited with inspiring the repertory theatre movement in America. In 1947 she established the first regional professional company and opened Theatre ’47 in Dallas. Her project served as the forerunner of the repertory movement.
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[edit] Early Career and Theatre '47
Jones worked in community and professional theatres in California, Houston, and New York. She traveled the world, experiencing theatre everywhere, and eventually gained commercial success on Broadway as co-director of the original production of The Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams. She also directed Williams's Summer and Smoke and Maxwell Anderson's Joan of Lorraine, starring Ingrid Bergman as Joan of Arc. All three plays were filmed - Joan of Lorraine as Joan of Arc (1948 film). The Glass Menagerie has been filmed more than once, and is a classic of the American theatre.
These successes allowed her to take the next step toward her dream of opening a repertory theatre outside of New York. She moved back to Texas and opened Theatre ’47 in Dallas, which changed its name to the corresponding year every New Year’s Eve. Her theatre was the first of its kind in America: a non- profit residential regional professional theatre. Jones was inspired by Franklin Roosevelt’s Depression era National Theater Project and the European arts movement which she experienced first- hand in the 1930’s.
Though touring shows did exist at this time, there were no quality professional American theatre companies outside of New York. Jones believed in the decentralization of theatre. She wanted her art to exist beyond the realm of commercialized Broadway; she wanted great theatre to exist all across America, and reasoned if she and her collaborators succeeded “in inspiring the operation of thirty theatre like ours, the playwright won’t need Broadway” (Sheehy 2). Playwrights William Inge, Jerome Lawrence, and Robert E. Lee championed this sentiment when they received their first big breaks from Jones's Dallas theatre.
[edit] Residential Theatre Movement
Theatre ’47 was committed to staging new works and classics rather than revivals of past Broadway hits. Jones envisioned it as a place where actors, writers, and theatre technicians could have a steady job and not be subject to the volatility of the New York scene. Though the resident theatre movement didn’t take off until the 1960’s when the Ford Foundation began giving grants to theatre outside of New York, when it did start to boom these young theatres used Theatre ’47 as a model of how to build a new company (Weeks).
Jones published a book, Theatre-in-the-Round, in which she outlined a way for companies to start out cheaply. The book touches on board development, subscription sales, programming, actor/artist relations, and other issues relevant to new regional theatre companies. Her Theatre-in-the-round concept requires no stage curtain, little scenery, and allows the audience to sit on three sides of the stage. This concept was used by directors in later years for such well-known shows as the original stage production of Man of La Mancha, and all plays staged at the ANTA Washington Square Theatre, including Arthur Miller's autobiographical After the Fall. Theatres of this style had previously existed in colleges, but not in professional spaces.
[edit] Legacy
For eight years Margo Jones balanced her career between Broadway and regional projects. In Dallas, she staged the world premiere of Lawrence and Lee's Inherit the Wind, a fictionalized retelling of the Scopes monkey trial, after it had been rejected by several Broadway producers. The play received rave reviews and subsequently opened on Broadway in 1955, where it became a major hit. Inherit the Wind become an Oscar-nominated motion picture in 1960, and has been revived as a TV special three times. In 1955, Jones died at 43 from accidental exposure to poisonous carbon tetrachloride fumes from a newly-cleaned carpet in her apartment. Her commitment to theatre and innovative ideas inspired the growth of numerous resident companies, and made it possible for regions across America to experience the art she loved. The Margo Jones Award has been named after her.
[edit] References
“About Margo.” Sweet Tornado: Margo Jones and the American Theater. Ed. Jeff Whitmill. 2005. North Texas Public Broadcasting. 30 September 2006 <http://www.sweettornado.org/aboutmargo/>.
Sheehy, Helen. Margo: The Life and Theatre of Margo Jones. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1989.
Jerome Weeks. <http://www.stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/kera/local-kera-500137.mp3>.
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