About the Play:

Big White Fog is a full-length drama by Theodore Ward. A poignant family drama set in Chicago against a backdrop of the Great Depression and the inescapable racism of the times. Theodore Ward's landmark drama about family life and false dreams, Big White Fog, reveals how these battling factions fare during this raw and vivid period of American history.

Big White Fog is set in Chicago's South Side between 1922 and 1933 and follows the lives of the Mason family and the pursuit of their different and opposing beliefs, as they steer a course through post WW1 racism and the Great Depression. Struggling to keep his dreams alive and his family together, Victor Mason is an educated black man reduced to working on building sites. Supported by wife Ella, Victor believes that the answer to the black man's problems could be found in Marcus Garvey's separatist Back to Africa movement, while his brother-in-law Dan is committed to the American Dream, believing that the black community can and will prosper and succeed despite the twin evils of the Depression and of ubiquitous racism. As different generations strive to secure the Mason family's future, catastrophic decisions are made, leading to a heartbreaking twist and a blistering condemnation of America's Big White Fog.

This volume also contains extensive introductory material by writers, thinkers and activists such as Marcus Garvey, Richard Wright and James Baldwin.

Big White Fog was first produced in 1938 by the Negro Unit of the Chicago Federal Theatre Project at the Great Northern Theatre in Chicago, and revived in Harlem in 1940 as the inaugural production of the Negro Playwrights' Company, of which Ward was a co-founder with, among others, Paul Robeson, Richard Wright, and Langston Hughes.  It was nearly 60 years before Big White Fog received another major production at the Guthrie Theatein Minneapolis in 1995. The European premiere was in 2007 at the Almeida Theatre in London.

Cast: 7 female, 11 male

What people say:

"I doubt if there exists any more enthralling or important play about the struggle of blacks to survive in pre-Second World War America than Big White Fog. It is that rare dramatic thing: a drama which extends one's awareness of life, resounding with justified anger and passion." — Evening Standard

"An intimate family tragedy and a charged play of ideas... a still-reverberating portrait of racial anger." — Independent on Sunday

About the Playwright:

Theodore Ward (1902-1983) was an American dramatist and author of more than 30 plays. Born in Louisiana, he moved to Chicago in n 1935, and began working for the Works Progress Administration in the Federal Theatre Project. He produced his most famous play, Big White Fog, in Chicago in 1938, and then formed the Negro Playwrights Company in 1940 to produce the play in New York City.