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Both authors doubted that the production would be successful. Janet Lee, arriving for the opening, was met at the airport by her husband, who told her repeatedly, "It's a disaster." Lawrence was so tense and exclaimed, "I can't stand it" so many times, that Margo finally suggested, "Well, Darling, why don't you just leave?" ²⁵

On opening night, January 10, Margo greeted the audience at the door as she always did. The sell-out crowd in black tie, furs and jewels was completely riveted by the play, watching entranced, some joining in the excitement during the prayer meeting. As for the anger that many thought would be unleashed by a play preaching free speech and the dignity of the human mind in the Bible Belt - no complaint was registered.

The company, the authors, and Margo went back to her apartment at the Stoneleigh Hotel to await reviews, which came in late that night. Lawrence has described Margo kicking off her shoes and reading the notices aloud with tears running down her cheeks.

Virgil Meiers in The Dallas Times Herald wrote that "Margo Jones directed Theatre '55 through its first premiere of 1955…lighting up a brilliant play. …Theatrical sparks flew…making the burning issue of the right to think sizzle and explode again. It is simply one of the best plays Miss Jones has staged at her theatre, and one of the best productions she has given to a play." ²⁶

Rosenfield wrote: "a new play of power, humanity, and universal truth found its way into Margo Jones' Theatre '55…one of the proudest productions of our unusual theatre." ²⁷ He compared the playwrights to Shaw and Ibsen. He further pleased Lawrence and Lee by realizing that the part of the journalist Hornbeck was written in iambic pentameter.

New York inquiries began as soon as the reviews came out. The Broadway production was acquired by Herman Shumlin, one of the eight producers who had initially turned the play down. Inherit the Wind opened at the National Theater on April 26, 1955, directed by Shumlin, and produced "in association with Margo Jones." Margo received her producing credit by virtue of having raised a significant portion of the budget, but Shumlin shut her out of any creative role in the production.

The play was a hit - as John Rosenfield had wryly predicted. It would do well in New York, Rosenfield said, because it "depicted the South that New Yorkers love: the South of tape worms, ignorance and bigotry." ²⁸ Shortly after the opening, Shumlin brought suit to enjoin Margo from repeating her own production at the end of her Dallas season in May. In still another invaluable news clip from Channel 5, Margo, Shumlin, and her Board Chair Eugene McDermott can be seen in a Dallas courtroom on May 31. Margo, taking the stand, looks like a Southern belle on a charm offensive. She was legally protected by her contract with Lawrence and Lee, and won the case easily. The play had two weeks' additional run in Dallas, and broke all attendance and box office records in the history of the theater.

The Broadway production, starring Paul Muni and Ed Begley, ran for three years, and the play was made into a successful movie with Spencer Tracy and Frederic March. It was revived for the Broadway stage in 1996 and has appeared in three television versions. It continues to be performed all over the world and has been translated into thirty languages.

Robert E. Lee says: "Margo saw in Inherit the Wind the conflict and the drama which not one other person in the American theater saw…she dared. As a result of this experiment in Texas, Jerry and I realized that theater must be allowed to escape from the little bird cage in mid-town Manhattan…. Broadway could not originate its own plays…they should be created on the Texas Fair Grounds, or in Louisville or the Long Wharf." ²⁹

Margo's vision and courage could have had no more eloquent tribute. She, however, never saw the national theater movement that her work helped to start. On July 24, 1955, she died as the result of a bizarre poisoning accident suffered in her apartment at the Stoneleigh. Headlines such as "Good Night, Sweet Tornado," national and local obituaries, and a stream of telegrams from theater celebrities attest to the shock of her death, at the age of 43, and to the value of her brief life.

Her theater struggled on for four years, then closed in 1959. Margo's reputation began to fade. Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, joined by Tad Adoue, established the Margo Jones award in her memory. Every year since 1961, the award has gone to an individual who has performed outstanding service to the theater. Eugene and Margaret McDermott provided funds to build SMU's Margo Jones Theater in 1969. A second theater bearing her name was inaugurated at her alma mater, Texas Woman's University in Denton, in 1982. A plaque describing Margo's achievements is now displayed in her hometown of Livingston, where she is buried in the Jones family plot.

Despite these efforts, Margo's name today is largely unknown. A major step in reviving her reputation came in 1989 with the publication of Helen Sheehy's well-researched, much-praised biography Margo: The Life and Theatre of Margo Jones. SMU Press will issue a new edition of the book in 2005.

Now philanthropic funds created by her old friends and colleagues have underwritten the one-hour high-definition documentary being produced by KERA for broadcast on PBS in spring 2005. The Dallas Foundation's Jean Baptiste "Tad" Adoue III Fund (which also sponsored the Dallas Museum of Art's tribute to Margo at its literary series "Arts & Letters Live" in 1977) is the lead supporter, together with the Eugene D. McDermott Foundation. The Hoblitzelle Foundation, Nancy B. Hamon, and a group of individual donors, many of whom knew Margo and attended her theater, have also contributed generously to this effort, which has received additional funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Texas Commission for the Humanities, the Texas Council on the Arts, and the Dallas Council on the Arts.

Texas talent - the actors Judith Ivey and Marcia Gay Harden - perform in the documentary, along with actor Richard Thomas. Next year will mark the fiftieth anniversary of Inherit the Wind's triumph, and of Margo's unexpected death.

"We always say we were born in Dallas as playwrights," Jerome Lawrence observed. ³⁰ On January 10, 2005, the fiftieth anniversary of Inherit the Wind's world premiere in Fair Park, the city that had been expected to end the play's chances for good can be excused for taking a self-congratulatory bow.

²⁵ Interview with Janet Lee, November 16, 1999.

²⁶ Dallas Times Herald, January 11, 1955.

²⁷ The Dallas Morning News, January 11, 1955.

²⁸ Ibid., January 29, 1955.

²⁹ Robert E. Lee interview, SMU Oral History Program, July 20, 1987.

³⁰ Telephone interview with Jerome Lawrence, February 15, 1997.