Charles Gordone

Charles Gordone
Born	Charles Edward Fleming 12 October 1925(1925-10-12) Cleveland, Ohio, USA
Died	16 November 1995(1995-11-16) (aged 70) College Station, Texas, USA
Occupation	Actor, director, playwright, producer, educator
Nationality	United States
Alma mater	Los Angeles City College UC Los Angeles CSU, Los Angeles Columbia University New York University
Spouse	Susan Kouyomjian
Information
Debut works	A Little More Light Around the Place (1964)
Magnum opus	No Place to be Somebody (1967)
Awards	Pulitzer Prize for Drama (1970)

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.

Biography

Early years

Born Charles Edward Fleming in Cleveland, Ohio to Charles Fleming and Camille Morgan, with a heritage of African-, Native-American, and European background. He grew up in Elkhart, Indiana with his brothers Jack and Stanley and his sister Shirley where he attended Elkhart High School.^[1] Camille Fleming remarried William L. Gordon and later had Gordone's sister Leah Geraldine.

Gordone married Juanita Barton in 1948 and had two children, Stephen and Judy Ann. He later had two other children, Leah-Carla and David.

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.

Career

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 No Place to be Somebody 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.

Personal life

After relocating to Taos, New Mexico, in 1987 for a fellowship at the D.H. Lawrence Ranch, residing in the cabin once occupied by D. H. Lawrence, Gordone and Kouyomjian married and began their tenure at Texas A&M University. President Frank Vandiver hired the Gordones to teach English and theater in a move to advance racial diversity in the arts at the College Station, Texas campus that had been segregated for 100 years, until 1963. During his eight years as a professor of theater arts, Charles Gordone taught, directed, and even offered to act in his students' plays. From 1990 to 1995, the Gordones joined the multi-racial Western Revival, involving poets, dancers, artists and singers, and inviting them into A&M classrooms as part of his "American Voices" program.^[2]

Gordone died of liver cancer on November 16, 1995. The cowboy poets and musicians of the Texas Panhandle honored him with a prairie funeral at sunset and scattered his ashes across the legendary XIT Ranch. In 1996, the National Endowment for the Arts profiled at length the Gordones' work for integration at Texas A&M University, for "strengthening the diverse bonds of our cultural heritage."

Legacy

The Texas A&M Creative Writing Program has established The Charles Gordone Awards to commemorate Gordone by offering cash prizes each spring in poetry and in prose to an undergraduate and graduate student. Efforts continue to establish a permanent memorial on the Texas A&M University campus.^[3] In 2011, "Legacy of a Seer," an exhibition of portraits of Gordone painted by Robert Schiffhauer, was on display at the Wright Gallery at the Texas A&M College of Architecture.^[2]

Awards

• 1953 Obie Award Best Actor – Of Mice and Men
• 1969 Drama Desk Award for Most Promising Playwright – No Place to Be Somebody
• 1970 Pulitzer Prize for Drama – No Place to Be Somebody
• 1970 Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award
• 1971 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award ^[4]

Bibliography

• 1964 A Little More Light Around the Place
• 1967 No Place to be Somebody: A Black-Black Comedy
• 1969 Worl's Champeen Lip Dansuh an' Watah Mellon Jooglah
• 1970 Chumpanzee
• 1970 Willy Bignigga
• 1970 Gordone Is a Muthah
• 1975 Baba-Chops
• 1976 Under the Boardwalk
• 1977 The Last Chord
• 1978 A Qualification for Anabiosis
• 1983 The Block
• 1983 Anabiosis

References

1. ^ "Elkhart Grad Won Pulitzer Prize". Elkhart Community Schools. September 12, 2007. http://elkhart.k12.in.us/content.php?id=708284. Retrieved 2008-12-19. 
2. ^ ^{a b} Phillip Rollfing (April 28, 2011). "'Legacy of a Seer: A&M architecture professors' art honors playwright, professor, racial unity advocate'". http://archone.tamu.edu/college/news/newsletters/spring2011/stories/Schiffhauer_exhibit.html. Retrieved 2011-06-22. 
3. ^ Amanda Casanova (February 2, 2008). "'Just Call Me a North American mestizo'". http://media.www.thebatt.com/media/storage/paper657/news/2008/02/22/News/just-Call.Me.A.North.American.Mestizo-3228173.shtml?refsource=collegeheadlines. Retrieved 2008-12-19. 
4. ^ "Academy Awards". American Academy of Arts and Letters. 2008. http://www.artsandletters.org/awards2_popup.php?abbrev=Academy. Retrieved 2008-12-19. 

External links

• Charles Gordone at the African American Registry
• Charles Gordone at the Internet Broadway Database
• Charles Gordone at the Internet Movie Database
• Charles Gordone at the Internet Off-Broadway Database

• National Endowment for the Arts, The Changing Faces of Tradition, "A Revival Meeting and Its Missionaries: The Cowboy Poetry Gathering", Buck Ramsey, October 1996. (Reprinted in Contemporary Authors, vol. 180.)
• Peacock, Scott, ed., Gordone, Charles 1925-1995. Contemporary Authors, vol. 180 (Detroit, Michigan: Gale Group, 2000) 166-176.
• Honoring A Life's Work Realized, The Eagle (October 11, 2004)
• Austin American Statesman, October 11, 2004, "A Tribute to Life Without Labels", Ralph Haurwitz.
• Capturing A Legacy - Pulitzer Prize Winning Former Professor Memorialized Today, The Battalion (October 12, 2004)
• Dallas Morning News, Texas Living Section, "Requiem for a Maverick", Bryan Woolley, November 14, 2004.
• 'Into the West', The Battalion, July 20, 2006, Matthew Watkins.
• The Eagle, July 20, 2006, "A Man of Vision--New Museum Honors Pulitzer Prize Winning Lecturer Gordone"
• The Short Happy Afterlife of Charles Gordone, The Touchstone (Feb/March 1996)
• E-Notes Charles Gordone Literary Criticism

Persondata
Name	Gordone, Charles
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	October 12, 1925
Place of birth	Cleveland, Ohio, USA
Date of death	November 16, 1995
Place of death	College Station, Texas, USA