Big White Fog gets a stellar revival at Court Theatre

In Mark Larson’s 2019 book Ensemble: An Oral History of Chicago Theater , longtime Chicago theatermaker Pemon Rami, founder of the influential La Mont Zeno Theatre, tells Larson that Chicago playwright Theodore Ward “is considered the godfather of black theater in this country,” and cites his work cofounding the Negro Unit of the Federal Theatre Project with Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, and Richard Wright during the Depression. Ward, who was born in Louisiana and knocked around a few places before settling in Chicago in 1933, was the first Black dramatist to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship. (He used it to write John Brown , based on the life of the abolitionist and staged in Chicago in 1951.) He was also a member of the South Side Writers Group, alongside other luminaries of Black