Black History Month Day 14 ~ Charles Gordone

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Posted: 2/14/11 at 9:43pm

Charles Edward Gordone (October 12, 1925 - November 16, 1995) was an American playwright, actor, director, and educator. He was the first African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and devoted much of his professional life to the pursuit of multi-racial American theater and racial unity.

Gordone attended Los Angeles City College, California State University, Los Angeles, UCLA, and later, New York University and Columbia University. After a tour in the U.S. Air Force, Gordone moved to New York City where he waited tables and acted. After performing in numerous on and off Broadway shows, Gordone won an Obie Award in 1953 for his role in an all-black production of Of Mice and Men.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Gordone continued acting, started directing and co-founded both the Committee for the Employment of Negro Performers and the Vantage Theater in Queens. He performed in Jean Genet's The Blacks, 1961–1966, along with James Earl Jones, Maya Angelou, Cicely Tyson, and many other Black actors who went on to change Hollywood. He said that acting as the valet in the play changed his life, and that this was when he began to write No Place to Be Somebody.

It was during his employment as a bartender in Greenwich Village that Gordone found inspiration for his first major work, No Place to be Somebody, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. He was the first African American playwright, and it was the first off-Broadway play to receive the award. Written over seven years, the play explored racial tensions in a Civil Rights era story about a black bartender who tries to outsmart a white mobster syndicate. In his final speech, in June 1995, delivered at the Museum of the American West in Los Angeles, Gordone described the play as being "about country folk who had migrated to the big city, seeking the urban myth of success, only to find disappointment, despair, and death." The play had three national touring companies from 1970 to 1977, which he directed. From 1978 to 1980, Gordone returned to his native Midwest and worked in the theater and college community of St. Louis, Missouri. He also began work on a stage Western.

In 1981, Gordone moved back to California, where he met his future wife Susan Kouyomjian in Berkeley. After working together for three years at her theater, American Stage, Gordone returned to New York City to resume work on his stage Western entitled Roan Brown & Cherry. Soon after, Kouyomjian joined him in Harlem.

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