Up Next: Spotlight Reading Series
Photo of the 2023 Spotlight Reading Series by Ollie Photography.
Join us for the annual Spotlight Reading Series. This year’s Spotlight highlights Theodore Ward, author of Big White Fog, which will open Court’s 2025/26 Season.
Playwright Theodore Ward, born in Thibodaux, Louisiana, left home at age 13 and traveled widely across the United States. He studied at both the University of Utah and the University of Wisconsin. Later, in Chicago, Ward taught at the Lincoln Center Players and became friends with author Richard Wright, who introduced him to the South Side Writers Group. Through Wright, Ward also joined the Chicago Writers Workshop of the Federal Theatre Project, where he wrote Big White Fog in 1938. The play was later produced by the Negro Playwrights Company, which Ward co-founded in New York City with Langston Hughes and others in 1940. In 1949, Ward made history as the first Black playwright to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship. Over the course of his career, he wrote more than 30 theatrical works, along with essays, poems, and parts of two folk operas. From 1968 until his death in 1983, he lived and worked in Chicago.
We invite you to engage with Court’s Spotlight Reading Series, August 13–15, as we explore Theodore Ward’s extraordinary contributions to the American theatre and Black cultural history.