Angeles, California State University at Los Angeles
and Los Angeles City College and served in the U.S.
Air Force. Records show that, he received a B.A.
degree from California State University in 1952.
By 1952, at age 27, Gordone relocated again,
this time to New York, where he worked as a waiter
and as an actor. He married Juanita Barton and
fathered two children, Stephen and Judy Ann.
After appearing in the original production of Jean
Genet’s The Blacks, Gordone won the Best Actor
of the Year Award for his role in Luther James’s
all-black off-Broadway production of Of Mice and
Men; he played the title role in Wole Soyinka’s The
Trials of Brother Jero. He was the associate pro-
ducer of the film Nothing but a Man. Also in New
York, Gordone became an activist, cofounding the
Committee for the Employment of Negro Perfor-
mance with Godfrey Cambridge and working with
the Ensemble Studio Theatres, the Actors Studio,
and the Commission of Civil Disorders. He also
became an instructor for the New School for So-
cial Research in New York from 1978 to 1979. He
married Jeanne Warner, with whom he fathered a
daughter, Leach-Carla.
In 1970, Gordone won the Pulitzer Prize for
drama for his first produced play, No Place to Be
Somebody, a Black Comedy in Three Acts (1969).
This was the first time the award was given to an
off-Broadway play, and Gordone was the first Af-
rican-American playwright to win this award in
this category. (GWENDOLYN BROOKS had won the
Pulitzer for poetry in 1952.) Set in Johnnie’s Bar,
a West Village bar operated by Johnny Williams,
a hustler and crook, No Place to Be Somebody fo-
cuses on the lives of several club regulars—prosti-
tutes, gangsters, ex-cons, civil rights workers, and
crooked politicians—but primarily on the ruthless
and violent Williams, whose goal is to take over
the neighborhood’s racketeering underground life
from the local syndicate. Equally important is bi-
racial Gabe Gabriel, a playwright and actor whose
difficulty getting parts is directly related to the
color of his skin: He is too white for black roles.
Gabriel seems to be the raconteur and the raison-
neur of the play, the spokesperson for the author.
No Place to Be Somebody is, fundamentally, Gabri-
el’s play within a play.
Gabriel’s recitative, “There’s mo’ to being black
than meets the eye,” remains among the classic
lines in African-American letters:Bein’ black is like the way yea walk an’
Talk!
It’s the way’a lookin’ at life!
Being’ black is like saying’, “What’s hap-
penin’,
Babee!”
An’ bein’ understood! (No Place to Be
Somebody 432–433)Ironically, over the years black playwrights,
actors, and scholars made Gordone persona non
grata for his declaration, at the height of the BLACK
ARTS MOVEMENT, that “there has never been such
a thing as ‘black theatre’ ” (Gordone). Gordone
is said to have declared: “There’s no such thing
as black culture” (quoted in Costa, 1). Gordone
was more interested in a “multiracial American
theatre”; he wanted a “truly American Theatre”
(Costa, 2).
No Place to Be Somebody, whose original cast
included Ron O’Neil (of “Super Fly” fame) as Gabe
Gabriel, was a tremendous success. Although a few
critics had problems with some identifiable dra-
maturgical flaws, most compared No Place to Be
Somebody to the works of Eugene O’Neill and called
Gordone the best playwright since Edward Albee.
In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, Gordone received
several awards for his professional achievements,
including an Obie Award for best actor (1953), a
Los Angeles Critics Circle Award (1970), a Drama
Desk Award (1970), and the Vernon Rice Award
(1970). Gordone died from cancer in College Sta-
tion, Texas, where he was on the faculty of Texas
A&M University for almost a decade.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Costa, Richard H. “The Short Happy Afterlife of
Charles Gordone.” Available online. URL: http://
http://www.rtis.com/Reg/bcs/pol/touchstone/Febru-
ary96/costa.htm. Accessed October 16, 2006.
Gordone, Charles. No Place to Be Somebody. In Con-
temporary Black Drama from A Raisin in the Sun
to No Place to Be Somebody, edited by Clinton F.210 Gordone, Charles