"[5] She traveled internationally, experiencing theater abroad, and eventually gained commercial success on Broadway as co-director of the original production of The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams.

Jones was inspired by Franklin Roosevelt's Depression-era National Theater Project and the European arts movement, which she had experienced directly during the 1930s.

The resident company was dedicated to staging new plays and classics of world theater rather than revivals of past Broadway hits.

She wanted her art to exist all across America, beyond the realm of commercialized Broadway, and this was a key component in the start of the regional-theatre movement.

"[6] Playwrights Inge, Jerome Lawrence, and Robert E. Lee championed this sentiment when they received their first big breaks from Jones' Dallas theater.

Jones envisioned it as a place where actors, writers, and technicians could have steady jobs and not be subject to the problems found in the volatile New York scene.

When the Ford Foundation began giving grants outside of New York during the 1950s, the movement gathered momentum and Theatre '47 became the model of how to build a new company.

In Dallas, she staged the world premiere of Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee's Inherit the Wind,[2][1] a fictionalized retelling of the Scopes Monkey Trial, after it had been rejected by several Broadway producers.

[9] Jones' innovative ideas inspired the growth of numerous resident companies, and made experiencing the art she loved possible for regions across America.

In 2006, a documentary film about her life and career, Sweet Tornado: Margo Jones and the American Theater, was shown on PBS.

The film features interviews with people who worked with her, including actor Ray Walston, who got his first big break in the original production of Summer and Smoke.