Big White Fog Reviews

Chicago Tribune - Highly Recommended

"...What a compelling project and what vibrant life here is given to a mostly lost Chicago play! Ward insisted on this play premiering not on the South Side but downtown in the Loop. He wanted the widest, most interracial audience possible. The play, and this new production in Hyde Park, deserve the same."

Chicago Sun Times - Highly Recommended

"...The classic play "Big White Fog" opens Court Theatre's first season under its new artistic director, Avery Willis Hoffman. The choice hits close to home: Theodore Ward's 1938 drama, set on the city's South Side, echoes in conversation with another South Side classic, Lorraine Hansberry's "A Raisin in the Sun," which Court staged last season."

Chicago Reader - Highly Recommended

"...Ward's play also taps into the restless revolutionary spirit of the 1920s and ?30s, not just through the ideology of Garvey but through communism. Lester, denied a scholarship because he's Black, goes to work for his uncle Daniel, but soon becomes enmeshed in leftist politics, in part through his Jewish friend, Nathan (Artem Kreimer)."

Let's Play Theatrical Reviews - Highly Recommended

"...Big White Fog is a play by American playwright Theodore Ward, his first significant work. The play follows the fictional Mason family living in Chicago's segregated South Side, across three generations between 1922 and 1933. The proverb "A house divided against itself cannot stand," which comes from Mark 3:25, vividly captures the turmoil within the Mason household, highlighting the tensions and conflicts that threaten to tear them apart. Victor, the proud patriarch of the family, supports a return to Africa and Garveyism, founded by Marcus Garvey; a political and racial doctrine that advocates for Black self-respect, unity, and economic independence, while promoting a Back-to-Africa movement."

Buzz Center Stage - Highly Recommended

"...Court Theatre has opened its 2025/26 season with a thunderclap: Theodore Ward's Big White Fog directed with remarkable sensitivity and vigor by Resident Artist Ron OJ Parson. This is not only a revival of a classic work from the Federal Theatre Project era-it is also a reminder of how eerily contemporary Ward's questions of ideology, disillusionment, and power struggles remain nearly ninety years after the play first startled audiences at Chicago's Great Northern Theatre in 1938."

PicksInSix - Highly Recommended

"...The theatre pioneer Theodore Ward's ambitious "Big White Fog" is the latest offering at Court Theatre, playing through October 12. It is directed in unabashedly huge strokes by Court Resident Artist Ron OJ Parson and, in many ways, is both a grand story of impact and resulting fallout and a lesson in time. There is an inevitable connection/comparison between Mr. Ward's opus and the delicate, powerful classic "A Raisin In The Sun" by Lorraine Hansberry. They are two plays in dialogue that address family and, more pointedly, the Black experience in America. They share the same soil but blossom differently in their individual stories. The period in which the Ward play is written-the edge of the Great Depression into those years of unrelenting economic challenge and unending-magnifies that painful reality."

MaraTapp.org - Highly Recommended

"...How many plays does one get to see that share the brilliance of Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican activist and leader who started the Black Nationalism movement? Big White Fog does just that and more."

Splash Magazine - Recommended

"...Theodore Ward's"Big White Fog," under the direction of Ron OJ Parson, delivers a compelling albeit at times lingering, theatrical experience at the Court Theatre in Chicago. Running through October 12, 2025, this production delves into the complex realities faced by a family seeking a brighter future in the urban landscape of the south side of Chicago."