Born in Livingston, Texas, Margo Jones grew up an energetic child who knew what she wanted to do from a young age. Her older sister died when she was 11, and biographers say it motivated her to become the woman her sister wanted to be and to get out of Livingston. At 15, she attended Girl’s Industrial College in Denton (now Texas Woman’s University). She wrote her thesis on Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, foreshadowing her life as a theater pioneer in Dallas and the world.
After studying theaters on trips from DFW neighborhoods to Japan and England, she earned notoriety in 1939 when Stage magazine named her one of 12 outstanding directors outside of New York—the only woman on the list. She met playwright Tennessee Williams early in his career and helped him get the attention of national critics. She directed the premiere of Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie.”
“Inherit the Wind,” about the 1925 Scopes trial in Tennessee that would decide whether a teacher could teach Darwin’s theory of evolution, had been turned down by eight Broadway producers. She would go on to produce in the heart of the fundamentalist South, and the reviews in Dallas celebrated the play. It was soon picked up by Broadway, where it would be performed 806 times over the next several years.
She used the ensuing fame it brought her to open the first nonprofit resident theater in Dallas as part of her goal to build a network of theaters outside of Broadway. Known as the Dallas Civic Theater, its first production was in 1947 at Theatre ’47 in the Gulf Oil Building at Fair Park. It was the first professional theater-in-the-round in the country, using minimal sets on stage with the audience surrounding the players. The company was also one of the few professional theater companies outside of New York.
In 1953, Jones helped start an amateur Black theater company in still segregated Dallas called Round-up Theatre, where she directed plays that performed in her theater. She broke the color lines when she invited a mixed audience to attend the opening night for Round-up. In a documentary about her life called “Sweet Tornado: Margo Jones and the American Theater,” Round-up actor Earnest Wallace describes Jones. “She didn’t have any problem mingling with us. It’s very easy to see whether a person of a different color has a problem mingling with us. You could tell she wanted to really do it.”
In 1955, she also directed the premiere of “Inherit the Wind,” which was about the 1925 Scopes trial in Tennessee that would decide whether a teacher could teach Darwin’s theory of evolution. Eight Broadway producers had turned down the play. She produced and directed it in the heart of the fundamentalist South, and the reviews in Dallas celebrated the play. It was soon picked up by Broadway, where it would be performed 806 times over the next several years.
Known as the “Texas Tornado,” Jones wanted “to create the theater of tomorrow today” and helped many actors and directors enhance their careers—notably producing the play “Inherit the Wind” about evolution before Broadway would touch it. In 1955, she tragically died when poisoned by a chemical used to clean her carpet just as her regional theater movement was taking off. Her legacy lives on today through the Margo Jones Theatre at SMU and the more than 300 nonprofit resident theaters that followed her lead nationwide.
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