Birthplace of Margo Jones
Livingston, Polk County, Texas
Marker Inscription
(1911-1955) World-famed genius of drama. Won Broadway acclaim directing "The Glass Menagerie." Led move to decentralize American theatre. Established, in Dallas, theatre-in-the-round (first professional, resident, repertory theatre of its kind) and wrote book on its technique. Premiered 58 new plays. Discovered Tennessee Williams, William Inge and others. A dedicated "artistic humanist," she provided channels through which the spiritual qualities of creative people could be communicated. (1967)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Livingston was the birthplace of Margo Jones (1911–1955), a visionary who reshaped American theater. After winning acclaim directing the Broadway premiere of "The Glass Menagerie," she founded in Dallas the nation's first professional resident theater-in-the-round and championed regional theater beyond New York. She premiered dozens of new plays and helped launch the careers of Tennessee Williams and William Inge.
Why it matters
Jones pioneered the decentralized regional-theater movement that still defines how live drama reaches American audiences outside Broadway.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Margo Jones was born in Livingston in 1911, when this was a small East Texas town of piney woods, farms and timber. For a girl growing up here, professional theater was a world away. In those years serious American drama was made almost entirely in New York, and the rest of the country mostly saw touring productions of shows that had already succeeded on Broadway.
She came of age in the Depression, when the federal government briefly funded theater across the country and showed that audiences far from Manhattan wanted live drama of their own. After World War II, Americans had new prosperity, growing cities and a new confidence, and many began to ask why their own communities couldn't produce original theater.
That question became Margo Jones's life work. The East Texas girl from Livingston would help answer it for the whole country.
People & events
Jones's breakthrough came on Broadway, where she won acclaim directing The Glass Menagerie, the play that made Tennessee Williams famous. She could easily have stayed in New York. Instead she came home to Texas with a radical idea: a permanent, professional theater company outside New York that would stage new plays, not just revivals of old hits.
In Dallas she built it. Her company performed in the round, with the audience seated on all sides of the actors. This was the first professional resident repertory theater of its kind in the country. The format was intimate and inexpensive to stage, and it put viewers almost inside the play. She wrote a book on the technique so others could copy it. Her theater premiered 58 new plays, an astonishing number. Among them was Tennessee Williams's Summer and Smoke, and she championed William Inge and other young playwrights before they were well known.
The marker calls her an artistic humanist, a person who believed theater was a way for creative people to share what mattered most. She died in 1955, only in her mid-forties, but the movement she started was already spreading.
Its place in the American story
Margo Jones is often remembered as a founder of the American regional theater movement. Before her, the American stage meant Broadway. After her, it meant a network of professional companies in cities across the country, each developing its own artists and new work.
Her Dallas theater proved that a resident professional company could survive and thrive far from New York. In the years that followed, other founders, many of them women, built lasting theaters in cities such as Houston and Washington. Today most American cities of any size have a professional theater that traces part of its heritage to the model she championed.
There is a broader lesson here too. Jones believed that art should not be concentrated in a single place, and that audiences in Texas deserved new plays as much as audiences in Manhattan. When you see a world premiere at a regional theater today, you are seeing her idea at work.
If you visit
This is a quiet stop in an East Texas town. Its interest lies in the contrast between where Margo Jones started and how far her influence reached. Stand at the marker and think of a small-town girl who would one day help change how a whole nation makes theater.
Livingston sits among the piney woods of Polk County, and the drive through the surrounding forest country is part of the experience. It fits naturally into a road trip through East Texas.
If her story catches your imagination, the best tribute is to see a play. Plan an evening at a professional regional theater in Dallas, Houston or wherever your trip takes you, especially one staging a new play. Few historic markers point so directly to something you can still experience live.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Margo Jones
- · Tennessee Williams
- · William Inge
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
The Livingston Telephone Company
Livingston, TX
Organized on August 3, 1903, the Livingston Telephone Company became Polk County's oldest public utility, a locally owned exchange running a 24-hour switchboard above a downtown building. It began with just 40 hand-cranked telephones, growing to 124 by the time creosoted poles went up in 1909. In 1959 the exchange finally converted to fully automatic dialing.
Margaret V. "Margo" Jones
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Livingston native Margo Jones became one of the most influential figures in mid-twentieth-century American theatre, championing nonprofit regional theatre and the theatre-in-the-round staging she pioneered in Dallas. She guided the careers of Tennessee Williams and William Inge, directing Broadway productions including The Glass Menagerie and Inherit the Wind, and organized the Houston Community Players. Named one of the nation's outstanding little-theater directors, she died in Dallas in 1955, but her model of resident professional theatre endures.
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By 1905 Livingston's old city cemetery was full, so residents formed the Forest Hill Cemetery Association in 1906 and bought a hilltop south of downtown, where Arthur B. Garner became the first burial that November. Women organized the Ladies Cemetery Association in 1908 to beautify the grounds, and in the 1930s Marion Tew's stewardship even prompted the paving of Washington Avenue — Livingston's first paved street. Its stones mark thirty Confederate and one Union soldier alongside circus figures and acclaimed theatre director Margaret 'Margo' Jones.
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