1. James Theodore Ward was a leftist political playwright and theatre educator during the first half of the 20th century and one of the earliest contributors to the Black Chicago Renaissance.
16 Facts About Theodore Ward
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Theodore Ward's staged works were lauded for their innovative depiction of the black experience, most notably for doing away with the spiritual ballads and feverish dancing that dominated "Negro theatricals" of his time in favor of a more nuanced, naturalistic approach to plot and character.
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Theodore Ward's best known works are the drama Big White Fog, produced by the Negro Unit of the Federal Theatre Project in Chicago as well the musical Our Lan' which premiered on Broadway at New York's Royale Theatre.
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Theodore Ward was born in Thibodeaux, Louisiana, the sixth of eleven children to Everett Theodore Ward and his wife Mary Louise.
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Theodore Ward's father had been born into slavery but, upon being granted freedom, became a schoolteacher and part-time salesman to support his growing family.
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Theodore Ward headed north, supporting himself with occasional work as a boot-black, hotel bellboy, and barber-shop porter, but eventually ended up in jail for bootlegging in Salt Lake City, Utah.
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Theodore Ward rediscovered his love for writing, and eventually amassed an impressive corpus of poetry, short stories, and essays that helped him to gain entry into an extension program at the University of Utah in 1930.
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Theodore Ward's essay won the prize, and he departed for the one-year program in Madison, where he studied literature and dramatic arts in addition to working as a script writer and voice actor for WIBA-Radio Madison.
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Theodore Ward participated first as an actor with the FTP, but eventually began working on a short theatre piece that he had been inspired to write in 1934 after attending a lecture on the suppression of African-American voting rights in the South at the John Reed Club, a semi-national, Marxist gathering for writers, artists, and intellectuals, named after the American journalist John Reed.
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The success of Big White Fog in Chicago prompted Theodore Ward to seek wider reaching theatrical success in New York City.
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Theodore Ward traveled east as an actor in the chorus of the FTP's 1939 production of The Swing Mikado, and settled in with Wright in Harlem where he was writing for the Communist newspaper, the Daily Worker.
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The outbreak of World War II delayed the play's first production and, in the interim, Theodore Ward was forced to take on odd jobs to support his new family.
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Theodore Ward was among those "black-listed" during the Red Scare of the McCarthy era.
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Nevertheless, Theodore Ward continued to live and work in Chicago, teaching drama classes for children there in 1963, helping to found the South Side Center for the Performing Arts in 1967, and serving as playwright-in-residence for the Free Southern Theater based in New Orleans during the 1970s.
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Theodore Ward died of a heart attack in Chicago on May 8,1983.
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In 2015, Theodore Ward was inducted into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame.