Big White Fog
| Big White Fog | |
|---|---|
1938 poster
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| Written by | Theodore Ward |
| Date premiered | April 7, 1938 |
| Place premiered | Great Northern Theater, Chicago, Illinois |
| Original language | English |
| Genre | Drama |
| Setting | Chicago, Illinois |
Big White Fog is a play by American playwright Theodore Ward and his first major work. The play follows the fictional Mason family across three generations between 1922 and 1933. Half of the family supports a return to Africa and Garveyism, while the other half of the family seeks the American Dream.
Completed in 1937, it was first produced by the Negro Unit of the Chicago Federal Theatre Project in 1938 at the Great Northern Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. A 1940 revival of Big White Fog was the first production of the Negro Playwrights Company in New York. Michael Attenborough directed its European premiere in 2007 at the Almeida Theatre, and commissioned their resident playwright Roy Williams to write Out of the Fog, a modern look and comparison of contemporary blacks in England versus those in the 1920s in Chicago.
Ward was born in Louisiana in 1902, the sixth of eleven children. His father had been a slave. When Ward was seven years old he wrote a short play and showed it to his father, who threw it in a fire and said it was "the work of the devil". Ward's mother secretly educated him until her death some time around 1915 during childbirth. His family soon after broke apart, and Ward traveled on trains heading north. He performed various odd jobs, including bell hop, shoe-shine boy and barber-shop porter. He was arrested in Salt Lake City, Utah for selling gin (which was outlawed at the time because of prohibition). There Ward began writing again, mostly short stories and poems. In 1934 he moved to Chicago and wrote a one-act play titled Sick 'n Tiahd. The play won second place in a writing competition for a magazine, and Ward was encouraged by the winner of the competition, Richard Wright, to write a full-length play. Ward subsequently wrote Big White Fog. He went on to write over thirty plays including the Broadway-produced Our Lan'.
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