Big White Fog

Big White Fog is a play by American playwright Theodore Ward and was his first major work. The play follows the fictional Mason family across three generations between 1922 and 1933. Half of the family supports a return to Africa and Garveyism, while the other half of the family seeks the American Dream.

Completed in 1937, it was first produced by the Negro Unit of the Chicago Federal Theatre Project (FTP) in 1938 at the Great Northern Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. In 1940 Ward joined Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, Theodore Browne, Richard Wright and Alain Locke to form the Negro Playwrights Company in New York. Their first production was a revival of Big White Fog at the Lincoln Theatre in Harlem. The play received its European premiere at the Almeida Theatre in London on May 11, 2007, directed by Michael Attenborough. The script for Big White Fog was first published in 1974 in Black Theater USA.

Around the time of Almeida Theatre's European premiere of the play, they commissioned their resident playwright Roy Williams to write Out of the Fog, a modern look and comparison of contemporary blacks in England versus those in the 1920s in Chicago.