Jones, Margo

Jones, Margo (1913–55), manager and director. Born in Livingston, Texas, she attended Texas State College for Women then worked at the Pasadena Playhouse and other community theatres, until she was hired to be assistant director of the Federal Theatre Project in Houston. Jones remained in Houston, producing plays for that city's recreation department and first employed the arena‐style stage so long identified with her. In 1944 Jones applied to the Rockefeller Foundation for a grant to open an arena theatre for professional repertory in Dallas, resulting in an auditorium that opened in 1947 as Theatre '47, a name that was updated yearly. Among the plays first presented at her house were William Inge's Farther Off from Heaven (later rewritten as The Dark at the Top of the Stairs), Summer and Smoke, and Inherit the Wind. Even more important than the new talents she encouraged was her theatre's influence in spreading the vogue for arena‐style staging, her ideas expressed in her 1951 book Theatre‐in‐the‐Round. Her theatre closed in 1959, four years after her all‐too‐early death. Jones was also a respected director who staged plays in New York, most memorably her co‐direction of the original The Glass Menagerie (1945) and of Ingrid Bergman in Joan of Lorraine (1946). In 1961 Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee established the Margo Jones Award, given each year “to the producing manager of an American or Canadian theatre whose policy of presenting new dramatic works continues most faithfully in the tradition of Margo Jones.” Biography: Margo: The Life and Theatre of Margo Jones, Helen Sheehy, 1989.