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Charles Gordone — news, coverage & facts — IJR

Career

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Gordone continued acting and began directing. At one point, he sang and played guitar in a calypso band. He co-founded both the Committee for the Employment of Negro Performers and the Vantage Theater in Queens. His acting credits included Brother Jerro in The Trials of Brother Jerro Bohem, Hickey in Of Mice and Men, and The Valet in Jean Genet's The Blacks (1961–66) alongside James Earl Jones, Maya Angelou, Cicely Tyson, and many other Black actors who went on to change Hollywood. In the 70's, Gordone's distinctive voice guided him to four film collaborations with controversial animation director Ralph Bakshi; as Crazy Moe in Heavy Traffic, Preacher Fox in Coonskin, along with two uncredited vocal performances in Wizards and Hey, Good Lookin'. In 1987, Gordone appeared in the movie Angel Heart, starring Mickey Rourke, Lisa Bonet and Robert De Niro. He also assisted with the casting of the '60s feature film Nothing But a Man, starring Ivan Dixon, Abbey Lincoln, and Julius Harris.

Mr. Gordone's first play, A Little More Light Around the Place, was co-written with Sidney Easton in 1964. It was an adaptation of Mr. Easton's book of the same title.

It was during his employment as a waiter in a Greenwich Village bar that Gordone found inspiration for his first major work as a playwright, No Place to Be Somebody (Alexander Street Press), for which he won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Written over the course of seven years, the play underwent one major change in the course of its production: the omitting (by Gordone himself) of an imaginary character named Machine Dog. This character can still be found in the actual play versions (i.e. the rare, out-of-print Bobbs-Merrill and Samuel French editions, as well as the currently available Alexander Street Press version). Not only was Charles the first playwright of African-American descent to receive the Pulitzer, but No Place to Be Somebody was the first Off-Broadway play (Joseph Papp's The Public Theater) to receive the award.

No Place is the story of Black bar owner (Johnny Romero) trying to carve out his piece of the American Dream in a New York City neighborhood where most venues are run by the Mafia. Johnny's best friend (Gabe Gabriel) is a light-skinned black actor/writer who is too white-looking to land black roles and too ethnic-looking to get any white roles, and this causes him great angst. Romero is brimming with arrogance, and a "get-over" mentality, while Gabriel appears intent on holding high morals, and the two of them are always at odds. It was often said that both Johnny and Gabe represent Gordone's alter egos.

Described as a "Black-black comedy", No Place to Be Somebody soon hit Broadway running, under the production of Gordone's wife Jeanne Warner-Gordone and partner Ashton Springer (Broadway producer of Bubbling Brown Sugar). Subsequently, with Gordone as director, No Place played to packed houses with diverse audiences. From 1970 to 1977, the play toured nationally, with Gordone as author/director for all three separate companies. Jeanne coordinated, booked, and managed the touring companies, as little Leah-Carla traveled with her often-on-the-road mother. A theatrical legacy was being forged.

Personal life

In 1981, Gordone moved back to California, where he met his last wife and leading lady Susan Kouyomjian in Berkeley. Gordone worked with Kouyomjian for three years at her theater, American Stage. There, he directed classics such as August Strindberg's Miss Julie and Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire.

In 1984, Gordone returned to New York City to resume work on his stage Western Roan Brown & Cherry. Soon after, Kouyomjian joined him in Harlem, where they resided together.

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 went on to teach Theater History and Theater at Texas A&M University. Over a period of eight years, through his teaching and directing many of the university's stage play productions, he advanced racial diversity in the arts at the College Station, Texas campus, which had been segregated for 100 years, up until 1963. During his residency as a professor of Theater Arts, Charles Gordone joined the multi-racial Western Revival, involving poets, dancers, artists and singers, and invited them into A&M classrooms as part of his "American Voices" program.

Gordone was awarded membership in the Actors Studio.

On November 16, 1995, Gordone died of liver cancer. 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 New York City, simultaneously, fellow actors, playwrights, and directors gathered to hold a vigil memorial for him at The Public Theater. Charles's daughter, critically acclaimed singer/songwriter/musician (Butterfly Child, Dancing on the Dragon, and Phoenix From The Ashes: Rise CDs) and author (The Motorgirl Memoirs on Amazon.com) Leah-Carla Gordone, spoke, sang, and played her guitar at the event, where Charles's wife, Jeanne, was present, along with many former cast members of No Place to Be Somebody.

In 1996, the National Endowment for the Arts profiled, at length, Gordone's work for integration at Texas A&M University, for "strengthening the diverse bonds of our cultural heritage." On March 2, 2009, Jeanne Warner-Gordone died at the age of 70, leaving in her wake a book entitled To and From the Pulitzer: Charles Gordone's Quest for an American Theater, which details her No Place days, primarily containing numerous in-depth recollections by Chuck's closest colleagues, friends and family members.

Charles Gordone

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Charles Gordone

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