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She was also well grounded in political theater. She had run Houston's short-lived Federal Theatre Project in 1935, before the Texas Legislature shut it down as too left wing. ¹⁵ She had traveled in Europe and Russia, studying politically-tinged drama and observing the powerfully involved audiences. With her amateur group the Houston Community Players, she had presented works by the socially conscious playwrights of the Depression era, including Maxwell Anderson and Elmer Rice. On Broadway in 1946, she'd directed Maxine Wood's On Whitman Avenue, a play about desegregated housing in Detroit. And in Dallas in 1953, she'd broken the color line with Walls Rise Up, which she directed and presented in her theater with a cast of players from the black Round-up Theatre Company. The city's first mixed black and white theater audience attended the play. ¹⁶

But while Margo had all the convictions and credentials needed to give Inherit the Wind an authoritative production, the Dallas audience remained a question mark.

The audience and the critic
Margo kept excellent records (the Dallas Public Library's Margo Jones Collection is packed with business files, correspondence, scripts, photographs, clippings, memorabilia, and much more), but she lived before the age of the audience survey.

We can surmise, however, that, like Margo herself, many who attended her theater had come from small town or rural backgrounds. Some had been transformed into rich, well-dressed theater patrons with money recently earned from oil, cotton, real estate, and banking. In his memoir In the New World: Growing Up with America from the Sixties to the Eighties, Lawrence Wright describes Dallas, where he grew up, as a city "self created like no other." ¹⁷ But for all their forward-looking optimism and tendency to ignore the past, many Dallasites of the 1950s had roots in small, religious communities similar to the play's fictional Hillsboro.

This alone would guarantee Margo an involved audience for Inherit the Wind, and there were also other strands in Dallas history and society that were on her side.

The city had a progressive tradition, as exemplified by the Civic Federation, founded as far back as 1917 as a forum for continuing education, cultural programs, and political discussions. Margaret Sanger, the crusader for birth control, the socialist Norman Thomas, and labor advocate Max Eastman had all spoken there, along with black educator Booker T. Washington, biologist Julian Huxley, and philosopher Bertrand Russell. ¹⁸

Dallas also loved pleasure and entertainment - even today Dallas audiences are regarded as "hot" in theater parlance: eager to laugh and respond. Large crowds flocked to the downtown vaudeville houses lining Elm Street early in the century and attended the same theaters when they were transformed into movie palaces in the 1920s. The highly successful amateur Dallas Little Theater had built a theater tradition from the 1920s to the early 1940s. Dallasites also loved the State Fair - educational but entertaining, with a history of tantalizing spectacles such as the Apple Dance offered by Mlle Corinne (a native Texan) at the 1936 Texas Centennial. In a contemporary newsreel, she appears to have performed totally in the nude. Enjoying its own history as a wide-open town, Dallas was said to have always had "a soft spot for a high class hustler." ¹⁹

Above all other factors favorable to Inherit the Wind, Dallas had John Rosenfield, the nationally renowned critic of The Dallas Morning News. Rosenfield, more than any other individual, built the cultural institutions of Dallas, and he ran its artistic life with an iron hand. Thanks to Rosenfield, Time magazine wrote, culture in Dallas bloomed "like a rose on the dry plains." ²⁰ Rosie himself had brought Margo to Dallas to open a professional theater. He supported her beliefs and theater philosophy, although he handed out bad notices freely when her productions disappointed him. He was well-qualified to judge the merits of Inherit the Wind, and his opinion would be heard.

Rehearsals
In December 1954, Jerome Lawrence arrived at Love Field to attend rehearsals. Margo met him, newsreel cameras in tow. Lawrence looks youthful and shy in WBAP Channel 5's archival footage. Margo, who had appeared aged and unfocused a month earlier at a luncheon in her honor at the Adolphus, looks rejuvenated. Co-author Lee arrived soon after to work with Margo and the cast.

The long courtroom speeches that Broadway producers believed would empty seats were thrilling and gripping to Margo. She dramatized them by placing extras who enacted the jury members on the stairs that separated the sections of the theater. As lawyers directed their arguments into the house, the audience felt that it was sitting in judgment. The small stage and nearness of the audience on all four sides worked to heighten the intensity of the play. The action engulfed the spectators, as Margo intended.

She was equally inventive in the Prayer Meeting scene. Again she placed actors on the stairs, this time as church members. Margo told the cast to seek out and watch Holy Rollers services to prepare for playing the scene - to be ready for "a lot of body movement and a lot of singing." ²¹ The music was created by stage manager Fred Hoskins, who was raised in a fundamentalist church in Fort Worth. Hoskins procured a drum to lead the actors onto the stage for the revival meeting, and as Harriet Slaughter recalls, "We came out marching, singing 'Follow the Fold.'" ²²

During rehearsals, according to Lawrence, "Margo got dead center and was the Preacher…to have the cast imbibe this, and my God it worked! During the performance, audiences were like part of the Prayer Meeting. They'd see someone in the aisle stand up and shout a Hosannah, and they'd stand up and shout a Hosannah." ²³ The wildness and excitement are still vivid to Janet Lee, who told us she has never seen the equal of Margo's staging of the prayer meeting. In the words of journalist Patsy Swank, the scene came "straight out of Margo's past, and straight out of the past of so many of us that were born in this part of the country and knew a lot about the importance of really functional religion." ²⁴

¹⁵ Marion Rhett Walters, "The Federal Theatre Project in Dallas," Legacies, 10, no.1 (Spring 1998): 35-44.
¹⁶ Carol Roark, "The Round-up Theatre: An African-American Amateur Dramatic Company," Legacies, 10, no.1 (Spring 1998): 50-52.
¹⁷ Lawrence Wright, In the New World: Growing Up with America from the Sixties to the Eighties (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 5.
¹⁸ Ronald L. Davis, John Rosenfield's Dallas (Dallas: Three Forks Press, 2002), 41.
¹⁹ June Bennett Larsen, "Margo Jones: A Life in the Theatre" (Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 1982), 147. This remark was made with reference to H.L. Hunt during a broadcast on ABC-TV, May 30, 1981.
²⁰ Time, December 1950.
²¹ Interview with Harriet Slaughter, February 27, 2001.
²² Ibid.
²³ Telephone interview with Jerome Lawrence, February 15, 1997.
²⁴ Interview with Patsy Swank, December 14, 1999.