Gordone, Charles 1925-1995

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Charles Gordone 1925-1995

American playwright.

INTRODUCTION

Gordone is best known for his 1967 play No Place to Be Somebody, the first drama by an African American writer to win a Pulitzer Prize and the first play ever to win the prize before being produced on Broadway. Critics have praised the work for its characterization and dialogue as well as for its depiction of the rage, despair, and dignity that comprise the human condition for people of all races. Gordone's other works—including Gordone Is a Muthah (1970) and The Last Chord (1977)—also address the trials of blacks in the United States, although Gordone always maintained that it was the American experience, rather than a specifically racial point of view, that was the inspiration for his works. He stressed that his writing did not stem from a black or white experience, but that it was American.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

Gordone was born in 1925 in Cleveland, Ohio, and raised in Elkhart, Indiana. He once described himself as a mix of races and nationalities, including African American, Native American, French, and Irish. Gordone recounted that his family was considered black, but lived in a white area. Despite having experienced academic and athletic success in high school, Gordone related in an interview for Ebony magazine that upon graduation he was "run outa town, not by white people, but by my own people, black people, because I tried to date a black girl." He studied at the University of California, Los Angeles, for one semester before completing a tour of duty in the U.S. Air Force. He then studied music at Los Angeles City College but eventually switched to drama at Los Angeles State College, from which he earned a bachelor's degree in 1952. After college, Gordone went to New York City to pursue an acting career. He earned roles in numerous plays on and off Broadway, winning an Obie Award for his performance in an all-black production of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. During the 1950s, Gordone founded his own theater, the Vantage, in Queens. There and elsewhere he continued to direct and produce, as well as write, plays. In the 1960s Gordone was chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality's Committee for the Employment of Negro Performers. In 1968 U.S. President Lyndon Johnson appointed Gordone to the Presidential Commission on Civil Disorders. In the late 1970s, Gordone worked as a teacher in the New Jersey prison system's Cell Block Theatre program, which provided a cultural and emotional outlet for the incarcerated. Enchanted with the American West, Gordone and his family moved to Taos, New Mexico, when he won a fellowship to the D. H. Lawrence Ranch in 1987. That same year Gordone was named a distinguished lecturer at Texas A&M University, where he taught English and theater until his death in 1995.

MAJOR WORKS

Gordone was heavily influenced by Jean Gênet's groundbreaking 1958 play Les Nègres (The Blacks), in which he performed on and off for six years in New York during the 1960s; joining him in the cast were such luminaries as James Earl Jones, Louis Gossett, Jr., Cicely Tyson, and Maya Angelou. Called "a clown show" by Gênet, the play featured black actors in the roles of their white oppressors. According to Gordone, The Blacks "created on stage the reality which was beginning to alter America outside the stage doors; so as we performed this ritual each night it became a way of comprehending through drama the rapid changes." When he began writing his own works, Gordone tapped into the energy of that experience to express his own impressions of being black in a white country. No Place to Be Somebody is Gordone's best-known and most acclaimed work. It was composed over a seven-year span, during which Gordone rewrote it six times. The play opened in May 1969 at Joe Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival Public Theater and later returned for an unlimited engagement. In December 1969 it moved to the American National Theatre and Academy and then to the Promenade the following month. No Place to Be Somebody is set in New York City and centers on Johnny Williams, a bar owner and small-time crook who is embittered by the treatment blacks have received from whites, and who dreams of organizing a black mafia. Several subplots involve such characters as Sweets Crane, an old gangster who is reduced to picking pockets after his release from prison; the black militant, Machine Dog; and the talentless drummer, Shanty Mulligan. Each of the play's three acts opens with a monologue by Gabe Gabriel, an unemployed light-skinned black actor. Johnny's overwhelming hatred of whites precipitates the play's catastrophic climax, a shootout that results in several deaths, including Johnny's. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, No Place to Be Somebody received the 1970 New York Drama Critics Circle Award and the Vernon Rice Award. Gordone Is a Muthah, which was published in The Best Short Plays 1973, is a collection of poetic monologues that Gordone performed at Carnegie Recital Hall. The Last Chord was first performed at New York's Billie Holiday Theatre and centers on corruption in the ranks of a Harlem church and an arrogant black bishop's confrontation with local gangsters. At his death, Gordone left two unfinished manuscripts—a stage western entitled Roan Browne and Cherry (1988) and a play called "Ghost Riders"—as well as a television script titled "Heart and Soul."

CRITICAL RECEPTION

Critical reaction to No Place to Be Somebody was overwhelmingly favorable, with critics comparing Gordone's work to that of Edward Albee and Eugene O'Neill. Critics—along with Gordone himself—also noted the play's relation to the traditions of Greek, Elizabethan, and Jacobean drama. The play was not without its detractors, however. Some critics found it sloppy and plodding, with an overly explicit social agenda. Despite his repeated insistence that he wrote from an American perspective, rather than from a specifically African American perspective, Gordone found that critics—both white and black—invariably judged him as a black playwright and viewed his works through a racial lens. With The Last Chord, in particular, critics were offended by Gordone's take on African American religious con artists. In addition to his work as a playwright, Gordone continued to be involved in American theater, both as an activist and a teacher for many years, and although No Place to Be Somebody remains Gordone's best known work, his contributions to the field of American drama are note-worthy, especially his insistence that his work be judged on its own merits rather than his position as an African American writer.

PRINCIPAL WORKS

A Little More Light around the Place [with Sidney Easton] (drama) 1964

No Place to Be Somebody (drama) 1967

Chimpanzee (drama) 1970

Gordone Is a Muthah (monologues) 1970

Willy Bignigga (drama) 1970

Baba-Chops (drama) 1975

The Last Chord (drama) 1977

A Qualification for Anabiosis (drama) 1978

Roan Browne and Cherry (unpublished drama) 1988

CRITICISM

Charles Gordone with Susan Harris Smith (interview date 1988)

SOURCE: Gordone, Charles, and Susan Harris Smith. "An Interview with Charles Gordone." Studies in American Drama, 1945-Present 3 (1988): 123-32.

[In the following interview, Gordone discusses his thoughts on the state of contemporary American theater; the role of minorities in theater as playwrights, audiences, and critics; and major themes in his own works.]

Currently a Distinguished Lecturer in the Department of Speech Communication and Theatre Arts at Texas A&M University, Charles Gordone is best known for his play, No Place to Be Somebody, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize, the Drama Desk Award, and the Los Angeles Critics Circle award in 1970. At the time, Walter Kerr hailed Gordone as "the most astonishing new American playwright to come along since Albee" (New York Times, 18 May 1969). Other reviewers, stirred in part by Kerr's effusiveness, were deeply critical of the play's mix of melodrama, surrealism, and harsh social vision. Gordone himself heightened the ensuing debates with his refusal to be narrowly pigeon-holed as "black." Repeatedly, he has defined himself as an American concerned with what he calls "American chemistry," the cross-cultural mixture of races and religions. Translated into several languages and produced all over the world, No Place to Be Somebody ran for two years on Broadway and for three years on national tours.

Gordone, who began his career as an actor, appeared in the original Off-Broadway production of Genet's The Blacks and toured with the show for four years. He also has extensive credits as a director. Recently he has been working with Susan Kouyomjian, the Artistic Producing Director of the American Stage in Berkeley, a theatre company designed to break through apartheid on the stage. Together they created a multicultural theatre where actors of different ethnic origins were integrated into traditionally "white" roles without losing their unique identities as Latinos, Blacks, or Asians. The aim was to dramatize a critical aspect of American society, that it is not simply multiracial or multicultural, but more significantly cross-cultural.

At present, Gordone is working on a new play, Roan Browne and Cherry, which will reflect his concern for America's cultural diversity, and on a television pilot called Heart and Soul, a "dramedy" set in Harlem. The following interview took place by phone from his home in College Station, Texas, on 10 January 1988.

[Smith]: Nearly twenty years ago you won the Pulitzer Prize forNo Place to Be Somebody. How did winning the prize and being the first black man to do so affect you?

[Gordone]: I have a history of being "the first" and I understand what that means. The news of my being a man of color seemed equally as important as my work.

Therefore, it was less of a distinction for me, and more of an insight as to how limited American theatre had been up until the seventies.

You have not been a prolific writer and yet you spend a great deal of time on each work. Could you describe your methods of composition?

No Place was my first work, and winning the prize interrupted any creative momentum I had. You see, most writers, take Mamet and some of the other writers, have written plays and gotten some momentum before they won any prize. This was my first and everybody leaped on it, and I was taken off the typewriter for quite a while. I directed two or three national tours [of No Place ] and so there for seven years, 1970-1977, I was very much preoccupied with directing this play. It takes time to start a play and so I give it a great deal of thought.

No Place has been translated into several languages. How has the play been received abroad?

In some instances, not very well. They love the gangsterism in it because that's what they hear about, but they find it hard to understand. There's a great disparity—the play has to be interpreted out of their stereotypical idea of what they know about American blacks. Someone has to interpret it, because it completely destroys what they know about American blacks. They're very curious about it, and they love to discuss it.

Has it gone over better in some countries than in others?

Italy, France, and in South America. It's a question of mixed bloods—a problem of mixed bloods. In France they're up on Franz Fanon and Gênet.

If you were to rewriteNo Place today, how would you change it, if at all?

Oh, you don't change it at all, but you will direct it for today's audience, and I had this experience in Los Angeles with the recent revival at the Matrix in Los Angeles (17 July 1987). You can't do a sixties interpretation because the play, underneath, is a play about the relationships among human beings. It's also a play about people who have no place to be. The conservative mind today doesn't know the sixties and the early seventies, and does not respond to that kind of theatrics any more. You have to present your problems in a much more human way. We have the same problems as the sixties today, but we have to address them from our time.

You have cited Gênet as a formative influence on you. Can you expand on this?

Gênet's The Blacks, which I acted in for six years during the sixties, created on stage the reality which was beginning to alter America outside the stage doors; so as we performed this ritual each night it became a way of comprehending through drama the rapid changes.

On you as an artist? On you as a director? On you as a playwright?

On all of it. I'm not just a writer for the theatre, I do it all, so it just affected me, the person.

What other writers have influenced you?

Oh, I couldn't say. I don't know of any because I don't recognize any of my style, or whatever, because I don't write specifically from a soapbox attitude, so I don't recognize it in any other writer.

What writers are you conscious of having influenced?

No Place has had sort of a cult following but I don't know of any particular writer that has openly admitted that I have had an effect upon him.

You resisted the critics who narrowly defined you as a black playwright by repeatedly insisting that you are a black playwright writing about America. Has this stance had either negative or positive consequences?

Because I'm a playwright of color who does not write black plays, I've experienced some isolation. I don't write exclusively about blacks. The scholars who put together anthologies don't know what to call me, but that's their quandary, not mine. I personally see that not to be categorized is an advantage for any playwright. If I've been made to pay a price or experienced any negative consequences, I must also say there is a tradeoff in not belonging to either that makes it possible for me to talk to all. As a consequence, I'm able to create characters from a whole spectrum of American people. It's been an essential part of my work.

Recently you have had some trouble with the critical reception ofThe Last Chord, your play about con artists in the black church. Given the current flap over the PTL fiasco, your subject seems quite timely. Are the critics still insisting on seeing you as black first and a writer second?

Yes, that is racist; and also, when a black writer writes about anything—if it has any kind of scope to it—once they learn he's a black, they begin to work from there. So you're always a black first. Yet we should look at the writer writing a full spectrum. I try to write about all people (and we are a country that's very diverse) and to say I have a black point of view is putting me in a corner.

Do you think that other writers, say Chicano or Chinese, have the same problem?

Yes, I think that Luis Valdez has this problem.

What about women writers?

Yes, I think so, too. It applies there, too.

How do you assess the state of the American theatre today?

I think it's a sensitive field; we are still bound up in a racist tradition. Many folks in the theatre have seen things a certain way for so many years that it's difficult to integrate a lot of my thoughts and ideas because traditions are in the way. It's very slow; I know there are many parts of the country that are behind, behind socially, and the children did not experience any of the civil rights movement or know much about it—they're just ignorant no matter what color they are. The answer lies with the playwright: every problem does not have to be a Caucasian one.

Have you spotted any up and coming new playwrights?

No, I haven't. The Color Purple and Fences fit the establishment pattern and are very popular. I think that the eighties have reinstated a stereotyped image of blacks.

You travel about the country a great deal. Do you think that regional theatre is strong? Are some parts of the country healthier for theatre than others?

No, I think it's more political than anything else; the attitudes seem to be so provincial. They're not taking a look at what's going on in other parts of the country, so I don't see regional theatre as doing much of anything.

Even theatre in Los Angeles which is focusing on cultural plurality?

There is some movement in Los Angeles, but nothing very strong to have an effect on the national scene. I think college theatre has largely been ignored because of academic influences, but I think that's where movement will come.

Do you follow what the critics and scholars have to say about you? If so, how do you process their observations?

Most of them are not familiar with the subculture.

What about the black critics who write about you?

Critics are critics, and they write about what they think their audience wants to hear. They have a tendency to roll with the idea. They're offended by the fact that I paint such a bleak future for blacks. I think what they're getting is the significant realization (which I reexamined in No Place ) that if blacks walk willingly into the mainstream without scrutiny their identity will die or they will go mad, and we cannot embrace that from which we instinctively retreat, so we have to, in my estimation, reinvent or transcend, and that presents a challenge which they have to reexamine. You know what some people say about the black bourgeoisie: a monkey in a tuxedo is still a monkey, so they find it hard put to understand that they're all scrambling to move into the society and become the very same thing they have been trying to avoid. They take on—they move in the same guise—they will have to. There's no way to change it once one's in it, and that's infallible. They can only be something else; they lose their identity, and of course, you see, what happens in No Place is they either kill themselves or they go mad.

Do you look for a different kind of society in which white and black are united?

It's inevitable, but it has nothing to do with white and black; it has to do with the communication of culture to people. You know, as Thoreau said, that's man's destiny, the adventure that has yet to be answered. If we keep talking black and white, in those terms we can never emerge. It all gets back to people; it's the humanness.

Is your kind of theatre going to help us understand our humanness?

I believe so, and I believe as we come up in the nineties they will be ready to listen—that's my sense—because of greater awareness of cultural diversity and ethnic groups, especially since we're made aware of it every day in one form or another. It's a question of "if I know who I am, I know where I'm going." See, if I don't know who I am, and I embrace your values, we both suffer.

How did your experience teaching in the Cell Block Theatre program in the New Jersey prisons influence you as a playwright?

It taught me a lot about my own criminal tendencies, but I enjoyed that, and I loved them and they loved me. They hated to see me go, but I knew where they were at. If you want to know what the country is all about, and if you really want to know social problems in the country and where they lead, you work in a prison, you see the eruptions—and we have eruptions as we talk all over this country. Somebody's doing something, and he doesn't do it for no reason, and he's just pointing to a lot of unfairness, to a lot of terrible, terrible things that happen. I could see this in one of the most realistic ways in prison; I could see these young boys, who had committed murders and were dealers in dope, had lived in a code you would cringe to know. And how, when they're rehabilitated, that's an act; they still have the same thoughts and feelings because the social situation has not changed. Someone else will rise to take their places.

Would you describe your new play,Roan Browne and Cherry ? Does the appropriation of a true story mark a new direction in your writing?

No Place was based upon a real story, a true experience, so Roan Browne and Cherry is no different. I write out of my own experience and observation. I've always done that; I can't sit down and make up a story. That would turn out to be sort of pamphleteer, that comes out of observation and that would come to close to journalism and reporting. You have to write on a gut level. I've had four or five different rewrites of Roan Browne and Cherry and it's still in process. I'm still wrestling with the question of identity.

Since 1977, you have been working with Susan Kouyomjian at the American Stage in Berkeley. Though some innovative theatres have been exploring the possibilities of "blind-casting," you have been utilizing the actors' ethnicity, what you call "seeing-casting," in challenging ways. How has this been received and does this herald a change in American theatre?

Yes, it does, when people begin to look at it with new eyes. Once they see it, they'll think, "Oh, it's so simple, why didn't I think of this before?" The minute you say, "we're going to have blind casting"—well, you know, we don't walk around blindly. The other ethnic groups in this country are extremely visible. We rub elbows with them every day. Why in the arts do we suddenly switch gears and make the change and continue on in our usual tradition? This is a country of extreme diversity with people of all races, colors, and creeds. We have to begin to look at this American experience as an American theatre. The current situation in which all sorts of "American" theatres have only WASPS has got to change, and even though we have high visibility of "minorities" on television it hasn't happened in the theatre. You could have a play that uses all whites or all blacks, but let's think historically, logically, and socially. Let's have something that has a social conscience.

Of the plays that you did in Berkeley, were there some that went particularly well in terms of "seeing-casting?"

Yes, there were; some were received better than others. It was a matter of trial and error, of defining and redefining this business of cultural backgrounds of each actor, of each character. You can't just go and say, "Well, now we'll have a blonde playing the mother, and a kid the color of your shoes playing her child." You can do that in the theatre for a certain kind of elite audience, you know, these liberals who are saying, "Oh, isn't that wonderful, we don't pay any attention to color!" You could do that somewhere like Milwaukee, but people are not going to accept that; people are going to accept just what they see every day. You can take a play and adapt it, or you can take a play and not adapt it. You take a play like Night of the Iguana and you cast the part of the minister as a black man. You don't see those kinds of black men, we just see black men screaming and hollering and carrying on, but if you cast him as a Harvard or Yale Divinity School graduate, who is in just as much a state of turmoil or in fact, more, the question of identity comes in more, and it enhances rather than takes away. Most people think that that kind of experience is only limited to whites. In Streetcar Named Desire we cast Stanley Kowalski as a mulatto who is part French and Creole. Here's a case of logical casting coming out of social background. There are damn few Polacks in New Orleans, particularly in the French Quarter. It enhances the struggle between Blanche and Stanley when she sees her sister married to this man out of the jungle, a mulatto who couldn't pass for anything else.

The critics have praised your ear for language, for the rhythms of individual speech. Can you discuss the function of unique voices in your plays?

My mother was great with dialect. I grew up with that kind of ear; most of the people in my family had that kind of ear. I came out of a diverse, racially mixed family. Diverse ethnic groups will have a tone, a pitch, a timing all their own. They have their own style, their own meter; they still think, though unconsciously, in their own native language. I don't care how well they speak the English, somehow their ethnicity will come through. When you're paying attention to that, if all your characters only spoke the standard English and came out of the same social background, then you have nothing to do but to talk about the problems of that sort of narcissism, you have no scope, you're limited with the kind of story to tell. So you will stay with sex and violence, because that's the only dramatic thing that comes out of your daily experience. There are more dramatic things than sex and violence.

Some writers see themselves as storytellers, others as shatterers of illusions, others as social reformers. How do you describe your function as a playwright?

I would say all of the above, but not consciously. If it happens, it happens. I don't want to be on a soapbox; I just tell a story. I will have some awakening, something I want to talk about; something will occur to me, and out of it a story will emerge. I don't sit down to write about a particular thing.

People in the theatre fall into two groups, either they love reading plays and going to see theatre, and seeing what other writers, directors, and actors are doing, or they do their own work and they stay completely away. Which camp do you fall into?

I don't go to the theatre very much. When people recommend things to me, I go and I'm usually disappointed. I eventually get around to reading things. When Sam Shepard has a new play out, I don't care to go see it because I know what Sam Shepard writes about; he's not writing about me. I try to write about Sam Shepard, but he's not interested in where I'm coming from. I don't go to see David Mamet because he's not writing about me; he doesn't even hang out in the places where I hang out. You see, theatre has a way of gobbling you up, and it just takes you right out of life, and the first thing you know, you're writing about it, or about Hollywood or something. I have a whole lot of other things going; I have a life outside of theatre. You can't reinvent sex, and you can't reinvent Hollywood. You can't turn and write about the very thing that you're in. The sun cannot define the sun. I can tell you pretty much where I'm at today, but I don't know where I'm going to be tomorrow.

OK, where are you today?

Well, in what way, mentally, spiritually, or physically?

What about all three?

I'm in good shape (laughter).

Harry J. Elam, Jr. (essay date 2001)

SOURCE: Elam, Jr., Harry J. "The Black Performer and the Performance of Blackness." In African Ameri-can Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader, edited by Harry J. Elam, Jr., and David Krasner, pp. 288-305. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

[In the following essay, Elam analyzes the ways in which Gordone's No Place to Be Somebody and William Wells Brown's The Escape have endowed black performers with the ability to transgress common perceptions of what it means to be black in America.]

This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions.

Yolanda W. Page (essay date 2004)

SOURCE: Page, Yolanda W. "Charles Gordone (1925-1995)." In African American Dramatists, An A-to-ZGuide, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, pp. 177-81. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004.

[In the following essay, Page presents a retrospective of Gordone's major works and themes, as well as offering a short biography and an overview of critical responses.]

This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions.