Abstract
Margo Jones had much in common with Hallie Flanagan. They were directors, they began their theatre work in higher education, and they were very ambitious. Both women yearned to reinvent the American theatre, and themselves with it. They were both products of small-town America—Flanagan’s itinerantly employed father moved them from South Dakota to Nebraska to Illinois to Iowa before she was ten and Jones grew up in Livingston, Texas which rarely had a population that reached a thousand. Even though they were born a generation apart (Flanagan in 1890 and Jones in 1911) both knew that small towns of the US were not where they were destined to make their careers. Most of Livingston, during the time Jones lived there, made their living in the fertile fields of humid East Texas, although Jones’ father was a prominent lawyer. The town was only 70 miles from Houston, but it might as well have been on the moon. “When I went to college from a tiny town in Texas,” she wrote much later, “I had seen only a few high school plays.”1 Her options as an undergraduate were not much better. She attended a small women’s school in Denton, Texas, in the northern part of the state where it is hot, flat, dry, and prone to tornados. But when she arrived the city was nearly ten times larger than Livingston, and the Girls’ Industrial College of Texas (now Texas Woman’s University) had a library.
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Notes
Helen Sheehy, Margo: The Life and Theatre of Margo Jones (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 2005 [1989]) 18.
Karen J. Blair, The Torchbearers: Women and their Amateur Arts Associations in America, 1890–1930 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994) 143.
Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916–1931 (New York: Viking, 2014) 6.
Robert Boyce, The Great Interwar Crisis and the Collapse of Globalization (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) 429.
Sheldon Cheney, A Primer of Modern Art (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924) 234
DeAnna M. Toten Beard, Sheldon Cheney’s Theatre Arts Magazine: Promoting a Modern American Theatre, 1916–1921 (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2010) 12.
College of Creative Studies, “History,” http://www.collegeforcreativestudies.edu/about-us/history. Accessed 3 March 2014.
Sheldon Cheney, “Editorial Comment,” Theatre Arts 1.2 (August 1917): 166.
Sheldon Cheney, “Editorial Comment,” Theatre Arts 2.2 (December 1917): 48.
Sheldon Cheney, “Editorial Comment,” Theatre Arts 2.2 (February 1918): 101.
Catherine Ann Tabor, “Edith Juliet Rich Isaacs: An Examination of her Theories and Influence on the American Theatre,” diss. (University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1984): 4.
Caroline J. Dodge Latta, “Rosamond Gilder and the Theatre,” diss. (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1974): 15.
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America,” Signs 1.2 (Autumn 1975): 7.
Rosamond Gilder, “La Nostagilder: Some Letters of Eleonora Duse,” Theatre Arts 10.2 (June 1926): 368.
Helen Sheehy, Eleonora Duse: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 2009) 125–26.
Dorothy Chansky and Terry Brino-Dean, “A New Theatre: Theatre Arts (1916–64) and Drama (1911–31),” The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Vol. II: North America 1894–1960, ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (Oxford University Press, 2012) 383.
Sheldon Cheney, “Foreword,” Theatre Arts 1.2 (November 1916): 1.
Sheldon Cheney, The Art Theatre: A Discussion of its Ideals, its Organization and its Promise as a Corrective for Present Evils in the Commercial Theatre (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1917) 15.
David Savran, Highbrow/Lowdown: Theatre, Jazz, and the Making of the New Middle Class (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009) 63.
Christin Essin, Stage Designers in Early Twentieth-Century America: Artists, Activists, Cultural Critics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) 8.
Joan Acocella and Lynn Garafola, “Introduction,” André Levinson on Dance: Writings from Paris in the Twenties, ed. Joan Acocella and Lynn Garafola (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1991) 18.
José Juan Tablada, “The Dance in Mexico,” Theatre Arts 11.2 (August 1927): 637–44.
Constance D’Arcy Mackay, The Little Theater in the United States (New York: H. Holt, 1917) 15.
David Belasco, Theatre through its Stage Door (New York: Harper, 1919) 228–29.
Peter A. Dart, “The National Little Theatre Tournament 1923–1931,” Educational Theatre Journal 1.3 (October 1964): 253–54.
Joseph Urban, “The Stage,” Theatre Arts 3.2 (April 1919): 125.
Kenneth Macgowan, Footlights Across America: Towards a National Theatre (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929) 22.
Isaacs, “Tributary Theatre,” Theatre Arts 10.2 (September 1926): 570.
Dorothy Chansky, Composing Ourselves: The Little Theatre Movement and the American Audience (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 2004) 132.
Tino Balio and Lee Norvelle, The History of the National Theatre Conference (np: National Theatre Conference, 1968) 13–14.
Roy Gittinger, The University of Oklahoma 1892–1942 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1942) 148. There had been a School of Dramatic Art since 1927, but Jones’ arrival focused and increased the presence of theatre on campus (153–54). The mainstage theatre at the University of Oklahoma is named for Rupel Jones. “Drama Facilities and Technology,” http://www.ou.edu/content/finearts/drama/facilities-tech.html. Accessed 7 March 2014.
Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: Liveright, 2013) 231.
National Recovery Administration, “Proposed Code of Fair Competition for the Legitimate Full Length Dramatic and Musical Theatrical Industry” (Washington DC: US Government Printing Office, 1933). https://archive.org/details/proposedcodeoffair00unse. Accessed 28 February 2014.
Edith Isaacs, “Editor’s Note,” preceding Joseph Verner Reed, “Apologia of a Producer: Farewell to All the Pomps and Vanities,” Theatre Arts 18.2 (February 1934): 106.
Carla Kaplan, Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance (New York: HarperCollins, 2013) 21.
Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993 [1940]) 223. The second musical he mentions was actually titled Runnin’ Wild. It ran at the New Colonial Theatre for 228 performances, October 1923 to June 1924.
The music was composed by James Johnson, the book written by F. E. Miller and Aubrey L. Lyles, with lyrics by Cecil Mack. Runnin’ Wild, Internet Broadway Database, http://www.ibdb.com/production.php?id=9308. Accessed 14 March 2014.
James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (New York: Arno Press, 1968 [1930]) 188.
Montgomery Gregory, “The Drama of Negro Life,” The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Alain Locke (New York: Touchstone, 1997 [1925]) 156.
Zona Gale, “The Colored Players and their Plays,” Theatre Arts 1.2 (May 1917): 140.
The DLA praised Ridgely Torrence’s work highly. Blair, The Torchbearers, 152. Carl Van Vechten reviewed it rapturously. Emily Bernard, Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance: A Portrait in Black and White (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012) 41–42.
Harry Elam, “Black Theatre in the Age of Obama,” The Cambridge Companion to African American Theatre, ed. Harvey Young (Cambridge University Press, 2012) 257.
Kenneth Macgowan, “New York Sees Native and European Plays of Real Distinction,” Theatre Arts 5.2 (January 1921): 6. In the same issue the magazine published the entire play.
Alain Locke, “The Drama of Negro Life,” Theatre Arts 10.2 (October 1926): 702.
Henry Louis Gates and Gene Andrew Jarrett, “Introduction,” The New Negro: Readings on Race, Representation, and African American Culture, 1892–1938, ed. Henry Louis Gates and Gene Andrew Jarrett (Princeton University Press, 2007) 1.
Arnold Rampersad, “Introduction,” The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Alain Locke (New York: Touchstone, 1997 [1925]) ix.
George Tichenor, “Colored Lines,” Theatre Arts 14.2 (June 1930): 490.
André Levinson, “The Negro Dance: Under European Eyes,” Theatre Arts 11.2 (March 1927): 284 and 288.
Alain Locke, “The Negro and the American Stage,” Theatre Arts 10.2 (February 1926): 112.
Stephanie Leigh Batiste, Darkening Mirrors: Imperial Representation in Depression-Era African American Performance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012) 10.
African American producers were rare on Broadway and Nikko Productions was only able to produce Shuffl e Along. Bernard L. Peterson, The African American Theatre Directory, 1816–1960: A Comprehensive Guide to Early Black Theatre Organizations, Companies, Theatres, and Performing Groups (Westport: Greenwood, 1997) 153–54.
Glenda Gill, “Rosamond Gilder: Influential Talisman for African American Performers,” Theatre Survey 37.2 (May 1996): 102.
Edith J. R. Isaacs, “The Negro and the Theatre: A Glance at the Past and a Prophecy,” Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life 1.6 (June 1935): 176.
Gill, “Rosamond Gilder,” 113–14. Also, Gordon Heath, Deep Are the Roots: Memoirs of a Black Expatriate (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996) 73–74
and James V. Hatch, Sorrow is the Only Faithful One: The Life of Owen Dodson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993) 50–54.
Edith J. R. Isaacs, The Negro in the American Theatre (New York: Theatre Arts, 1947) 27.
Locke as quoted in Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth, Alain L. Locke: The Biography of a Philosopher (University of Chicago Press, 2008) 346.
Hiram Kelly Moderwell, “The Art of Robert Edmond Jones,” Theatre Arts 1.2 (February 1917): 51.
Margaret Shedd, “Carib Dance Patterns,” Theatre Arts 17.2 (January 1933): 65–77.
Roberta Fernández, “Introduction: A Mosaic of Latino Literature in the United States,” In Other Words: Literature by Latinas of the United States, ed. Roberta Fernández (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1994) xxix.
Carleton Beals, “Las Carpas: Mexican Street Theatres,” Theatre Arts 12.2 (February 1928): 99–108.
Kate A. Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters Between Black and Red, 1922–1963 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002) 108.
Langston Hughes, “Tamara Khanum: Soviet Asia’s Greatest Dancer,” Theatre Arts 18.2 (November 1934): 835.
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© 2015 Charlotte M. Canning
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Canning, C.M. (2015). Theatre Arts: The Tributary Theatre. In: On the Performance Front. Studies in International Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137543301_2
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