Margo Jones (December 12, 1911 - July 24, 1955) is an American stage director and producer known for launching the American regional theater movement and introducing theater-in-the-round concept in Dallas, Texas. In 1947, he founded the first regional professional company when it opened Theater '47 in Dallas. Of 85 dramas that Jones performed during his Dallas career, 57 were new, and one-third of the new drama has a sustainable life on stage, television and radio.
Video Margo Jones
Karier awal dan Teater '47
Born Margaret Virginia Jones in Livingston, Texas, Jones works in professional communities and theaters in California, Houston and New York City. "Since 1936, Margo Jones has served as assistant director of the Federal Theater in Houston, traveling to Soviet Russia for a festival at the Moscow Art Theater, and founded and directed the Houston Community Theater.He recently joined the University of Texas drama department faculty in Austin ( about 1942). "He traveled the world, experienced theaters everywhere, finally gaining commercial success on Broadway as co-director of the original production of The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams. He directed Williams' Summer and Smoke , a failure in his first production but was greatly respected many years later. After he directed the successful Maxwell Anderson of Joan of Lorraine, starring Ingrid Bergman as Joan of Arc, he was fired during Washington, D.C. tryout. However, his name remains in tents and playgrounds, and no other director has ever been credited for production.
All three dramas were filmed. Bergman repeated his Joan of Lorraine role in Joan of Arc (1948), who was nominated for an Oscar. Geraldine Page was nominated by Oscar for her performance in Summer and Smoke (1961). Since 1950, there have been at least five different movies/TVs from The Glass Menagerie .
The success of The Glass Menagerie enabled him to take the next step towards his dream of running a theater repertoire outside New York. He moved back to Dallas and opened Theater '47 (which changed his name to the same year every New Year's Eve).
The theater is housed in a sleek Magnolia Lounge building (Magnolia Petroleum Company, then Mobil Oil), designed by Swiss-born architect William Lescaze, in 1936 for Centennial Texas and located on Fair Park land in Dallas. This theater is the first nonprofessional professional resident theater in America and also the first theater-in-the-round theater stage in the country. Jones was inspired by Franklin Roosevelt's Depression era National Theater Project and the European art movement he had experienced directly during the 1930s. This resident company is dedicated to staging new dramas and classic world theater rather than revival of Broadway hits in the past. The first season introduced William Inge's first game, Farther Off from Heaven , later revised as The Dark at the Top of the Stairs .
Maps Margo Jones
Regional theater movement
Though the tour shows are there at the moment, there is no qualified American professional theater company outside New York. Jones believes in the decentralization of theater. He wants his art to be all over America, outside Broadway commercialized. He reasoned that if he and his colleagues succeeded "in inspiring the operation of 30 theaters like us, the playwright would not need Broadway." (Sheehy 2). Playwrights Inge, Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee championed these sentiments as they received their first big respite from Jones's Dallas theater.
Jones envisioned it as a place where actors, writers, and technicians could have a steady job and not be subject to problems found in New York. When the Ford Foundation began providing grants outside New York during the 1950s, the movement gathered momentum and Theater '47 became a model for how to build a new company. (Sunday)
In his book The Theater in the Round, Jones outlines a low-cost method to enable the company to start, detailing valuable information about subscription sales, board development, programming, actor/artist relationships and other issues relevant to a new regional theater. company. His theater-in-the-round concept does not require a stage curtain, a small scene and allows the audience to sit on three sides of the stage. The concept was used by directors in recent years for famous performances such as the original stage production of Man of La Mancha, and all the dramas staged at the ANTA Washington Square Theater (destroyed in the late 1960s), including drama Arthur Miller's autobiography After the Fall (1964).
Death
On July 17, 1955, Jones invited friends to the party. However, during the party he spilled red paint on the carpet, so his secretary then brought professional cleaners to deal with it. They used carbon tetrachloride, a strong solvent commonly used in the dry cleaning process at the time. Jones, satisfied with the cleaning, fell asleep until late at night. Unfortunately, some carbon tetrachloride has been absorbed into the carpet and then evaporates, filling its home with toxic fumes. So he woke up dizzy; It was later discovered that the gas had caused kidney failure. He was later found unconscious on the couch and he was rushed to the hospital, but died 7 days later. According to his friends, he instantly realized and found he would die, and made complicated preparations for his burial, including asking his friends to dress him up properly and take care of him for his funeral. He died July 24, 1955 at the age of 43 years, never realized what killed him. In 1959, the theater was closed.
Legacy
For eight years Jones balanced his career between Broadway and regional projects. In Dallas, he held a world premiere of Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee Inherit the Wind, a fictional rerun about the Scopes monkey experiment, subsequently rejected by several Broadway producers. The drama received a warm welcome and then opened on Broadway in April 1955, where it became a big hit. Inherit the Wind became an Oscar nominated movie in 1960 and has been revived as a special TV three times.
Jones's innovative ideas inspired the growth of many resident companies, and made it possible for regions across America to experience the art he loved. In 1950-1955, producer Albert McCleery brought theater-in-the-round concept to television with his Cameo Theater .
The Margo Jones Award was founded in 1961 by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee.
Curious & amp; Unusual Death displays the Season 2 episode about Jones's death.
Television
In 2006, a documentary about his life and career, Sweet Tornado: Margo Jones and American Theater, was featured on PBS. With Jones portrayed by Judith Ivey, the film dramatizes the scenes of her life, adapted from her letters and correspondence with producers Broadway and Tennessee Williams (played by Richard Thomas). The film features interviews with the people who work with them, including actor Ray Walston, who got his first major breakthrough in the original production of Summer and Smoke .
Production stage
Listen
- Sweet Tornado: Margo Jones and American Theater clip interviews (Albert J. Devlin, Helen Sheehy, Judith Ivey, Jerome Weeks)
Messages
- Jones, Margo (1900). Unknown title. Self-published. http://www.worldcat.org/title/margo-jones/oclc/45586690?referer=di&ht=edition
- Jones, Margo (1951). Theater-in-the-round . New York: McGraw Book Coy.
Source
Sheikhy, Helen (1989). Margo: Life and Theater Margo Jones . Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press. Ã, ISBNÃ, 0-870-74296-5
References
External links
- Margo Jones on the Broadway Internet Database
- Margo Jones on IMDb
- Sweet Tornado
- Margo Jones at Discover the Mausoleum
- Margo Jones Papers at Dallas Public Library
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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