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.
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[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), for which she was Oscar-nominated. 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 running 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).
Her theater was in the sleek stucco-and-glass-block Gulf Oil Building, designed by Swiss-born architect William Lescaze, and situated on the grounds of Fair Park in Dallas. The theater was America's first modern nonprofit professional resident theater and also the first professional arena theater (theater-in-the-round) in the country. 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. The resident company was dedicated to staging new plays and classics of world theater rather than revivals of past Broadway hits. The initial season introduced William Inge's first play, Farther Off from Heaven, later revised as The Dark at the Top of the Stairs. [1]
[edit] Regional theater movement
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 that if she and her collaborators succeeded “in inspiring the operation of 30 theatres like ours, the playwright won’t need Broadway.” (Sheehy 2). Playwrights Inge, Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee championed this sentiment when they received their first big breaks from Jones' Dallas theater.
Jones envisioned it as a place where actors, writers and technicians could have steady jobs 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 to enable companies to get started, detailing 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.
[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. In 1950-55, producer Albert McCleery brought the concept of theater in the round to television with his Cameo Theatre.
The Margo Jones Award was established in 1961 by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee.
[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.
[edit] Margo Jones stage productions
[edit] 1942
- Eve of St Mark (Anderson), University of Texas, Austin
[edit] 1943
- Sporting Pink (Apstein), University of Texas, Austin
- A Choice of Weapons (Apstein), University of Texas, Austin
- You Touched Me (Tennessee Williams), Pasadena Playhouse, California
[edit] 1945
- The Glass Menagerie (T. Williams), Playhouse, New York
[edit] 1946
- On Whitman Avenue (Wood), Broadway, New York
- Joan of Lorraine (Anderson), Alvin Theatre, New York
[edit] 1947
- Farther Off From Heaven/Dark at the Top of the Stairs (William Inge), Theatre '47, Dallas, Texas
- Hedda Gabler (Ibsen), Theatre '47, Dallas, Texas
- How Now Hecate (Coleman), Theatre '47, Dallas, Texas
- Summer and Smoke (Williams), Theatre '47, Dallas, Texas; Music Box Theatre, New York, 1948
- Third Cousin (Matthews), Theatre '47, Dallas, Texas
[edit] 1948
- The Master Builder (Ibsen), Theatre '48, Dallas, Texas
- The Taming of the Shrew (Shakespeare), Theatre '48, Dallas, Texas
- The Importance of Being Earnest (Wilde), Theatre '48, Dallas, Texas
- Summer and Smoke (Williams), Broadway, New York
- Last of My Solid Gold Watches, This Property Condemned, and *Portrait of a Madonna (Williams), Theatre '48, Dallas, Texas
- Throng o' Scarlet (Connell), Theatre '48, Dallas, Texas
- Lemple's Old Man (Gurian), Theatre '48, Dallas, Texas
- Leaf and Bough (Hayes), Theatre '48, Dallas, Texas
- Black John (MacLane), Theatre '48, Dallas, Texas
[edit] 1949
- The Learned Ladies (Molière), Theatre '49, Dallas, Texas
- Twelfth Night (Shakespeare), Theatre '49, Dallas, Texas
- The Sea Gull (Chekhov), Theatre '49, Dallas, Texas
- She Stoops to Conquer (Goldsmith), Theatre '49, Dallas, Texas
- Here's to Us (Quin), Theatre '49, Dallas, Texas
- Sting in the Tail (Purefoy), Theatre '49, Dallas, Texas
- The Coast of Illyria (Parker and Evans), Theatre '49, Dallas, Texas
[edit] 1950
- Heartbreak House (George Bernard Shaw), Theatre '50, Dallas, Texas
- Ghosts (Ibsen), Theatre '50, Dallas, Texas
- An Old Beat-Up Woman (Scott), Theatre '50, Dallas, Texas
- My Granny Van (Disney and Perry), Theatre '50, Dallas, Texas
- Cock-A-Doodle Dandy (O'Casey), Theatre '50, Dallas, Texas
- The Golden Porcupine (Bolton), Theatre '50, Dallas, Texas
- Southern Exposure (Crump), Theatre '50, Dallas, Texas, and Broadway, New York
- A Play for Mary (McCleery), Theatre '50, Dallas, Texas
- An Innocent Time (Caulfield), Theatre '50, Dallas, Texas
[edit] 1951
- Lady Windermere's Fan (Wilde), Theatre '51, Dallas, Texas
- The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare), Theatre '51, Dallas, Texas
- Candida (G B Shaw), Theatre '51, Dallas, Texas
- A Willow Tree (Shiffrin), Theatre '51, Dallas, Texas
- One Bright Day (Miller), Theatre '51, Dallas, Texas
- Walls Rise Up (Duane), Theatre '51, Dallas, Texas 1951: One *Foot in Heaven (Phillips), Theatre '51, Dallas, Texas
- A Gift for Cathy (Alexander), Theatre '51, Dallas, Texas
[edit] 1952
- A Midsummer Night's Dream (Shakespeare), Theatre '52, Dallas, Texas
- Sainted Sisters (Nash), Theatre '52, Dallas, Texas
- The Blind Spot (Caulfield), Theatre '52, Dallas, Texas
- So in Love (Mathews), Theatre '52, Dallas, Texas
- I Am Laughing (Mayer), Theatre '52, Dallas, Texas
[edit] 1953
- Hamlet (Shakespeare), Theatre '53, Dallas, Texas
- The Rivals (Sheridan), Theatre '53, Dallas, Texas
- Goodbye, Your Majesty (Connell), Theatre '53, Dallas, Texas
- The Rising Heifer (Maugham), Theatre '53, Dallas, Texas
- The Last Island (Raskin), Theatre '53, Dallas, Texas
- Late Love (Casey), Theatre '53, Dallas, Texas
- Uncle Marston (Harding), Theatre '53, Dallas, Texas
- The Day's Mischief (Storm), Theatre '53, Dallas, Texas
[edit] 1954
- Volpone (Jonson), Theatre '54, Dallas, Texas
- The Footpath Way (Drake), Theatre '54, Dallas, Texas
- The Guilty (Granick), Theatre '54, Dallas, Texas
- Happy We'll Be (Raphaelson), Theatre '54, Dallas, Texas
- Oracle Junction (Raphaelson), Theatre '54, Dallas, Texas
- The Heel (Raphaelson), Theatre '54, Dallas, Texas
- A Rainbow at Home (Robertson), Theatre 54, Dallas, Texas
- Horatio (Wallach, Baker, and Harnick), Theatre '54, Dallas, Texas
- The Purification (Williams), Theatre '54, Dallas, Texas
- The Apollo of Bellac (Giraudoux), Theatre '54, Dallas, Texas
- The Brothers (Rodell), Theatre '54, Dallas, Texas
- A Dash of Bitters (Denham and Sutton-Smith), Theatre '54, Dallas, Texas
- Sea-Change (Case), Theatre '54, Dallas, Texas
- The Hemlock Cup (Hunt), Theatre '54, Dallas, Texas
[edit] 1955
- As You Like It (Shakespeare), Theatre '55, Dallas, Texas
- Inherit the Wind (Lawrence and Lee), Theatre '55, Dallas, Texas, and National Theatre, New York
- Whisper to Me (Johnson and Goyen), Theatre '55, Dallas, Texas
- La Belle Lulu (Offenbach and Previn), Theatre '55, Dallas, Texas
- The Girl from Boston (Hayes), Theatre '55, Dallas, Texas
[edit] Listen to
[edit] Sources
- Sheehy, Helen. Margo: The Life and Theatre of Margo Jones. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1989.
