“The Mind of an Adult, the Heart of a Girl”: Constructing Margo Jones in Rehearsal

In an interview, Brooks Atkinson recalled a young woman approaching him boldly in a hotel lobby, saying, “Mr. Atkinson, my name is Margo Jones. You don’t know me, but someday you will.” The warmth and self-confidence of the young Texan made an immediate impression on Atkinson, who remarked that Jones had “the mind of an adult and the heart of a girl.”¹ Though paternalistic, Atkinson acknowledges one of Jones’s great talents: her innate ability to promote herself. Terms like charisma, drive, and intuition are frequently employed in describing Jones as a champion of regional playwrights, a pioneer of arena staging, and an advocate for the decentralization of theatre in the United States.

The majority of historical readings cast Jones in the role of proponent of the decentralization of American theatre in the twentieth century. However, to know Margo Jones involves a more careful parsing of her motivations and the ways she transformed herself to meet the expectations of a changing marketplace. While Jones’s mutable personality and tactics of charm and persuasion can be read as chameleon-like and perhaps inauthentic, Jones’s promotion of her theatre and herself through a variety of methods can also be read as evidence of her intuitive understanding of the demand for virtuosity in the theatre.

This article examines representations of Margo Jones, particularly through the ways her directing persona and charisma were documented for two productions between 1949 and 1950. An Old Beat Up Woman by Sari Scott and Southern Exposure by Owen Crump premiered at Jones’s Dallas theatre and were then developed for Broadway audiences. The driving force for Jones behind moving these plays to Chicago and then New York was the promise of profit based on the highly successful performances in Dallas. The surety for investors was Jones’s attachment to each project. As an artistic leader, Jones capitalized on her bourgeoning celebrity as conveyed through publicity photographs and heard in interviews promoting the two plays. The unique contributions of Margo Jones, captured in these rehearsal and publicity documents, are registered in the outward extensions of her craft—her body and voice. To this end, I consider the following in examining the career and creation of Margo Jones as director and regional theatre leader: What is directing charisma and how is it mobilized in accounts of rehearsal? How can Jones’s work be read beyond her manifestos or anecdotal accounts of her personality? In short, how is charisma constructed in the marketing of celebrity directors?

While Jones is studied as a famous female director in American theatre history and leader of the United States regional theatre movement, the period of Jones’s mid-career is characterized by her risks and commercial failures in New York. Leading the theatre community in Dallas would not advance Jones’s career, nor would it extend her notions of a decentralized American theatre. Jones described the balance that she maintained between art and commerce explicitly in a 1948 interview: “Figure that I’m 51 percent creator and 49 percent promoter.”² The keen awareness in this brief comment that selling her art was just as important as creating it is noteworthy because her statement is also contingent on the idea of selling the artist. An emphasis on promotion enabled Jones to advance the plays, the regional theatre movement, and her own image simultaneously. In transcripts of Dictaphone tapes recorded in advance of a lecture tour in 1951, Jones described, in her estimation, the heart and mind of an ideal director: “To me the pertinent factor in establishing a successful theatre is getting one person who is a combination of business and artistic leadership. The theatre impulse comes from within . . . one person, one leader, could make a difference.”³ While describing the unique qualities of an ideal regional theatre director, Jones was also articulating her own it-factor. She was able to teach these traits and embody them for a national audience in a process of self-construction. In light of the commercial failures of An Old Beat Up...