Gordone, Charles (1925–1995), playwright, actor, director, screenwriter, lecturer, and Pulitzer Prize recipient. When Charles Gordone became the first African American to receive a Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1970 for No Place to Be Somebody (1969), New York Times drama critic Walter Kerr described him as “the most astonishing new American playwright since Edward Albee.” The NAACP's Crisis remarked that “Charles Gordone has definitely arrived.” Although No Place was by far Gordone's most successful project, it marked the middle of an extensive career, spanning well over forty years, in writing, acting, directing, and teaching.
Gordone, born in Cleveland, Ohio, on 12 October 1925, grew up in Elkhart, Indiana. Excelling in academics and athletics, he still struggled to gain acceptance in a predominantly white section of town where he lived and among African Americans in the town who questioned his racial allegiance. Though his diverse racial heritage excited an early preoccupation with identity that extended throughout his life and works, Gordone later, on numerous occasions, boasted of being “part Indian, part French, part Irish, and part nigger.” Following a semester of study at UCLA and some time in the air force, Gordone studied music at Los Angeles City College and subsequently received a degree in drama from California State University at Los Angeles in 1952.
After graduation Gordone moved to New York City to pursue acting and soon joined a Broadway production of Moss Hart's Climate of Eden, portraying the racially mixed character, Logan—a role he later revisited in 1961. In the 1950s and 1960s, while working in local theaters and managing Vantage, his own theater in Queens, Gordone directed several plays and continued a stage acting career. With few acting jobs available to African Americans, Gordone began writing out of necessity and, between performance engagements, worked as a waiter at Johnny Romero's, a Greenwich Village bar that later served as the framework for No Place. In 1961 Gordone performed in Jean Genet's The Blacks and shared the stage with a cast including Maya Angelou, Godfrey Cambridge, James Earl Jones, and Cecily Tyson. He later cited this six-year experience as a cornerstone in his personal and artistic development. At another notable juncture in his acting career, Gordone, in an all-African American cast of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, received an Obie Award for Best Performance in 1964.
Although he continued to distinguish himself as an actor and director, Gordone increased his political involvement off the stage. During the convulsant climate of the 1960s, Gordone served as chairman of the Committee for the Employment of Negro Performers, established in 1962 by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). A year later, he worked as the production manager for The Negro in America, a documentary funded by the United States Information Agency, and he accepted an appointment by President Lyndon Johnson to the Presidential Commission on Civil Disorders in 1968.
With the release of his first play No Place shortly thereafter, Gordone, like his contemporaries in the Black Arts Movement, converged political activism and artistic production. Between 1970 and 1977, Gordone directed national tours of No Place and, despite the accolades the play received, claimed the success of the play interrupted his creative momentum. However, Gordone continued to work against racial injustice and social disparity in the late 1970s as an instructor in the Cell Block Theatre Program, an effort to rehabilitate inmates in the New Jersey state prison system. As co-founder, along with Susan Kouyomijian, and director in residence of American Stage (1982–1985) in Berkeley, California, Gordone continued to challenge racial and cultural conceptions of the American theater and broadened the acting opportunities of African Americans, Latinos, and Asians by casting them in traditionally white roles.
In 1987 Gordone accepted a position as a distinguished lecturer at Texas A & M University, where he taught English and theater until his death in November 1995. In his later years Gordone remained active on stage as a playwright, director, and screenwriter. Through his work, Gordone probed the complexity of racial and cultural identity. Attempting to forge an inclusive American identity and to offer a poignant analysis of the place of African Americans in American society, Gordone emphasized the contiguity of human experience while underscoring the importance of an acknowledgment of racial and cultural difference. Works to his credit include No Place to Be Somebody (1969), Gordone Is a Mutha (1970), Baba Chops (1975), The Last Chord (1976), Anabiosis (1979), and two incomplete works, ““Roan Brown and Cherry”” and ““Ghost Riders”.”
Bibliography
- Warren Marr, “Black Pulitzer Awardees,” Crisis 77 (May 1970): 186–188.
- Jean Ross, “Charles Gordone,” in DLB,
vol. 7 , Twentieth Century American Dramatists, ed. John MacNi-cholas, 1987, pp. 227–231. - Charles Gordone, “An Interview with Charles Gordone,” interview by Susan Harris Smith, Studies in American Drama, 1945-Present,
vol. 3 , eds. Philip C. Kolin and Colby H. Kullman, 1988, pp. 122–132. - Bernard L. Peterson, Jr., Contemporary Black American Playwrights, 1988.
- Susan Harris Smith, “Charles Gordone,” in Speaking on Stage: Interviews with Contemporary American Playwrights, ed. Philip C. Kolin and Colby H. Kullman, 1996, pp. 167–175
Charles Leonard
