Margo Jones

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Margo Jones (December 12, 1911-July 26, 1955), an influential American stage director, was born Margaret Virginia Jones in Livingston, Texas. Her life's passion was theater, and she is best known for launching the American regional theater movement and for introducing the theater-in-the-round concept in Dallas, Texas. In 1947, she established the first regional professional company when she opened Theatre ’47 in Dallas. Of the 85 plays Margo Jones staged during her Dallas career 57 were new, and one-third of those new plays had a continued life on stage, TV and radio.

1 Early career and Theatre '47
2 Regional theater movement
3 Legacy
4 Television
5 Listen to
6 Reference
7 External link

[edit] Early career and Theatre '47

Jones worked in community and professional theaters in California, Houston and New York. She traveled the world, experiencing theater everywhere, eventually gaining commercial success on Broadway as co-director of the original production of The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams. She directed Williams' Summer and Smoke, a flop in its first production but highly regarded years later. After she directed Maxwell Anderson's successful Joan of Lorraine, starring Ingrid Bergman as Joan of Arc, she was fired during the Washington, D.C. tryout. However, her name remained on the marquee and playbills, and no other director was ever credited for the production.

All three plays were filmed. Ingrid Bergman repeated her Joan of Lorraine role in Joan of Arc (1948). Geraldine Page was Oscar-nominated for her performance in Summer and Smoke (1961). Since 1950, there have been at least five different film/TV productions of The Glass Menagerie.

The success of The Glass Menagerie allowed her to take the next step toward her dream of opening a repertory theatre outside of New York. She moved back to Dallas and opened Theatre ’47 (which changed its name to the corresponding year every New Year’s Eve). It was the first of its kind in America, a non-profit residential regional professional theater. Jones was inspired by Franklin Roosevelt’s Depression era National Theater Project and the European arts movement which she had experienced directly during the 1930s.

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 theater. She wanted her art to exist all across America, beyond the realm of commercialized Broadway. She reasoned if she and her collaborators succeeded “in inspiring the operation of 30 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' Dallas theater.

[edit] Regional theater 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 technicians could have a steady job and not be subject to the problems found in the volatile New York scene. When the Ford Foundation began giving grants outside of New York during the 1950s, the movement gathered momentum and Theatre ’47 became the model of how to build a new company. (Weeks)

In her book, Theatre in the Round, Jones outlined inexpensive methods for companies to get underway, with valuable information on subscription sales, board development, programming, actor/artist relations and other issues relevant to new regional theatre companies. Her theater-in-the-round concept requires no stage curtain, little scenery, and allows the audience to sit on three sides of the stage. That 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]] (demolished in the late 1960s), including Arthur Miller's autobiographical After the Fall. Such theaters 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 film 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 Dallas apartment. She was found unconscious on the floor and rushed to the hospital, where, according to friends, she regained consciousness, and slowly realized that she was dying, making elaborate preparations for it and instructing her closest friends to groom and dress her properly for burial. However, she never actually knew what had killed her.

Margo Jones' 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] Television

In 2006, a documentary film about her life and career, Sweet Tornado: Margo Jones and the American Theater, was shown on PBS. With Jones portrayed by Judith Ivey, the film dramatized scenes from her life, adapted from her letters and correspondence with Broadway producers and Tennessee Williams (portrayed by Richard Thomas). The film features interviews with people who worked with her, including actor Ray Walston, who got his first big break in the original production of Summer and Smoke.