Venezella Jones
Director, Education Director, Educator, Facilitor, Youth Theatre, Actor, Theatre Founder
1893-1973
Years:
Affiliations:
Federal Theatre Project
Ohio, New York, Pittsburgh
Locations:
Connections:
Evelyn Ellis, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Irene Colbert Edmonds
Venezella (also spelled Venzuella) Jones was appointed the director of the Negro Youth Theatre Unit of the Federal Theatre Project in New York in 1935, the only women in charge of a Federal Theater Unit in New York. She directed Conrad Seiler's SWEET LAND, a play portraying the lives of southern sharecroppers, with a large integrated cast. Sweet Land toured for families throughout New York. The Negro Youth Theatre "aims, above all else to give these performers an opportunity to develop..." Venezella taught many students in the Negro Youth Unit including Butterfly McQueen and Alice Childress who both gave credit to Jones.
In the early 1920s, Venzella taught at Morgan State College in Baltimore, and created the Morgan Dramatic Club. She was succeeded in this position by Randolph Edmonds, husband of Irene Edmonds also listed on this site.
She organized the Imperial Arts Players in Pittsburgh in 1924 and the Venzella Jones Repertory Group (1925-68) which performed mainly in churches and community centers including the Harlem Boys Club, St. Augustine's Church in the Bronx, Lenox Avenue Boys Club, and many more. She made her Broadway debut as a waitress in SAVAGE RHYTHM in 1931.
See below for the Youth Theatre Unit's Objectives as listed in the Federal Theatre Magazine Vol 1, No 2.
Alice Childress (1916-1994) spoke of Jones in an interview with Kathy Perkins. Childress ‘spoke of [Jones] with tremendous excitement’ as one of the mentors who deeply
influenced her, providing Childress with her first professional theatre train-
ing. ‘Under Jones, Alice Childress studied the classics and performed in little
plays Venezuela Jones wrote. She was the only woman Alice Childress knew
at the time who wrote plays...Childress described Jones as ‘a brilliant bossy dictatorial genius … embittered by the doors closed to great artists of African descent (quoted in Perkins 2011, xv).
See Cheryl Black's chapter "Actress-Entrepreneurs of the Harlem Renaissance / New Negro Era: Anita Bush, Abbie Mitchell, Rose McClendon, Mercedes Gilbert, Venzella Jones" in Jan Sewell and Clare Smout (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage.
And Profiles of African American Stage Performers and Theatre ... - Page 154 for more.
