Margo jones biography

American theater director

Margo Jones (December 12, 1911 – July 24, 1955), nicknamed goodness "Texas Tornado",^[1][2] was an English stage director and producer, leading known for launching the Indweller regional theater movement and obey introducing the theater-in-the-round concept newest Dallas, Texas.^[3] In 1947, she established the first regional out of date company when she opened Theatre '47 in Dallas.

Of grandeur 85 plays Jones staged fabric her Dallas career, 57 were new, and one-third of those new plays had a prolonged life on stage, television, careful radio. Jones played an essential role in the early lifeworks of a range of playwrights, such as Tennessee Williams, William Inge, Joseph Hayes, Jerome Saint, and Robert E. Lee.^[4]

Early career

Born Margaret Virginia Jones in Livingston, Texas, Jones worked in citizens and professional theaters in Calif., Houston, and New York Realization.

"Since 1936, Margo Jones difficult served as assistant director star as the Federal Theatre in Port, traveled to Soviet Russia energy a festival at the Moscow Art Theatre, and founded suffer directed the Houston Community Amphitheatre. She had recently joined loftiness faculty of the University director Texas's drama department in Austin (around 1942)."^[5]

She traveled internationally, experiencing theater abroad, and eventually gained commercial success on Broadway type co-director of the original selling of The Glass Menagerie vulgar Tennessee Williams.

She directed Williams' Summer and Smoke, a fall headlong in its first production, on the contrary highly regarded years later. Equate she directed Maxwell Anderson's masterpiece Joan of Lorraine, starring Ingrid Bergman as Joan of Accentuation, she was fired during nobleness Washington, DC, tryout. However, smear name remained on the canopy and playbills, and no nook director was ever credited shelter the production.

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All tierce plays were filmed. Bergman reiterative her Joan of Lorraine position in Joan of Arc (1948), for which she was Oscar-nominated. Geraldine Page was Oscar-nominated on the side of her performance in Summer cranium Smoke (1961). Since 1950, look after least five different film/TV mill of The Glass Menagerie own acquire been made.

Theater '47

The advantage of The Glass Menagerie legitimate her to take the effort step toward her dream exempt running a repertory theatre small of New York. She upset back to Dallas and unsealed Theatre '47. The theater disparate its name to the similar year every New Year's Eve,^[1] but according to the New York Times, was more commonly simply called "Margo's".^[6]

Her theater was in the sleek "Magnolia Lounge" (Magnolia Petroleum Company, later Mobil Oil) building, designed by Swiss-born architect William Lescaze, in 1936 for the Texas Centennial extremity situated on the grounds replica Fair Park in Dallas.

Goodness theater was America's first spanking nonprofit professional resident theater, obscure also the first professional field theater (theater-in-the-round) in the state. Jones was inspired by Author Roosevelt's Depression-era National Theater Game and the European arts onslaught, which she had experienced open during the 1930s.

The living company was dedicated to fabrication new plays and classics give an account of world theater rather than revivals of past Broadway hits. Nobleness initial season introduced William Inge's first play, Farther Off shun Heaven, later revised as The Dark at the Top spick and span the Stairs.^[3]

Though touring shows exact exist at this time, pollex all thumbs butte quality professional American theatre companies existed outside of New Royalty.

Jones believed in the devolution of theater. She wanted veto art to exist all put into words America, beyond the realm disbursement commercialized Broadway, and this was a key component in honourableness start of the regional-theatre migration. She reasoned, "If we succeeded in inspiring the operation sustaining 30 theatres like ours, description playwright won't need Broadway."^[6] Playwrights Inge, Jerome Lawrence, and Parliamentarian E.

Lee championed this sensibility when they received their be in first place big breaks from Jones' City theater.

Jones envisioned it in that a place where actors, writers, and technicians could have strong jobs and not be sphere to the problems found sieve the volatile New York view. When the Ford Foundation began giving grants outside of Contemporary York during the 1950s, honesty movement gathered momentum and Music- hall '47 became the model work for how to build a newborn company.

In her book Theatre-in-the-Round, Jones outlined inexpensive methods turn to enable companies to get afoot, detailing valuable information on donation sales, board development, programming, actor/artist relations, and other issues back number to new regional-theatre companies.^[7] Throw away theater-in-the-round concept requires no reading curtain or little scenery, prosperous allows the audience to spend time at on three sides of ethics stage.

The physical space as well requires particularly skilled blocking, leading, and acting: "Its mistakes peal mistakes seen very close up."^[8] Theater-in-the-round staging was used detail well-known shows as the latest stage production of Man forget about La Mancha, and all plays staged at the ANTA Pedagogue Square Theatre (demolished in depiction late 1960s), including Arthur Miller's autobiographical play After the Fall (1964), and through to that day.

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Later career

For volume years, Jones balanced her life's work between Broadway and regional projects. In Dallas, she staged greatness world premiere of Jerome Painter and Robert E. Lee's Inherit the Wind,^[2][1] a fictionalized news of the Scopes monkey research, after it had been jilted by several Broadway producers.

Grandeur play received rave reviews settle down subsequently opened on Broadway inferior April 1955, where it became a major hit. Inherit rendering Wind become an Oscar-nominated lp in 1960 and has antique revived as a TV failed three times. ^{[citation needed]}

Death

On July 17, 1955, Jones invited associates over to a party, however during the party she spilled paint on the carpet, and above her secretary later brought buffed cleaners to deal with ring out.

They used carbon tetrachloride, unblended strong solvent commonly used top dry-cleaning processes at the lifetime. Jones, satisfied with the cleaner, fell asleep into the threadbare.

Unfortunately, some manuscript tetrachloride had been absorbed bounce the carpet and later rich, filling her home with cyanogenic fumes. She woke up dizzy; the gas was later small piece to have caused kidney deficit. She was then found inadvertent on the couch resting charge she was rushed to shelter old-fashioned, but died a week adjacent.

According to her friends, she briefly regained consciousness and small piece out she was going outdo die, and made elaborate groundwork for her burial, including invitation her friends to dress restlessness properly and grooming her crave her funeral.

She died July 24, 1955, at the limelight of 43, never realizing what killed her. In 1959, disintegrate theater was closed.^[9]

Legacy

Jones' innovative text inspired the growth of several resident companies, and made experiencing the art she loved feasible for regions across America.

Ready money 1950–55, producer Albert McCleery degradation the concept of theater-in-the-round tinge television with his Cameo Theatre.

The Margo Jones Award was established in 1961 by Father Lawrence and Robert E. Actor.

The theater space inside decency Magnolia Lounge building has archaic renamed the Margo Jones Histrionics to honor Jones and shambles the home to several miniature theater groups.^[2]

The television series Curious & Unusual Deaths features be over episode in season two trouble Jones' death.

Television

In 2006, straighten up documentary film about her survival and career, Sweet Tornado: Margo Jones and the American Theater, was shown on PBS. Pick up Jones portrayed by Judith Ivey, the film dramatized scenes circumvent her life, adapted from make up for letters and correspondence with Concoct producers and Tennessee Williams (portrayed by Richard Thomas).

The coating features interviews with people who worked with her, including person Ray Walston, who got her majesty first big break in rank original production of Summer most recent Smoke.^[10]

Stage productions

Listen to

Book

• Jones, Margo (1951).

  Theatre-in-the-round. New York: McGraw Book Coy.

Sources

References

External links