About the Play:

No Place to Be Somebody has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Female/Male Scenes.

No Place to Be Somebody is a full-length drama by Charles Gordone. The play tells the story of a criminally ambitious black bar owner named Johnny looking to hoodwink his way out of small-time swindles by fighting the white mob that runs things in his New York City neighbourhood. Inspired by his own time as a bartender in Greenwich Village, Charles Gordone's play No Place to Be Somebody was produced on Broadway and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1970.

No Place to Be Somebody explores race relations, culture and the American dream at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. Johnny Williams is a Black man in New York with a bar and restaurant who also runs a small stable of prostitutes. One of them, a depressed young white woman named Dee, is in love with him. It's not enough for him, however. He has big plans to gain control of the local rackets. He wants to become “somebody” and he's depending on the return from the slammer of his mentor and father figure Sweets Crane to provide the support and alliance he believes he needs. It's a milieu of gangsters, hustlers, and rough characters, but two of Johnny's regulars, Gabe and Mel, have loftier ambitions. Gabe is an actor and poet; Mel is a dancer (and sometimes works in Johnny's kitchen). Johnny has opened his joint downtown, which is the turf of the white Mafia. His position is precarious enough, but when he makes a judge's daughter one of his girls and uses her as a pawn in a scheme to blackmail the local Mafia boss, he's really headed for trouble. There are gangsters, guns, and girls in the first play by an African American playwright and the first play from off-Broadway ever to win a Pulitzer Prize.

No Place to Be Somebody began as a workshop production in 1969 at Joseph Papp's Public Theater, moved upstairs to the larger Anspacher Theater, and closed after an extended run of 250 performances, followed by an acclaimed limited engagement at Broadway's ANTA Theatre. Written over the course of seven years, playwright Charles Gordone won national acclaim as the first African-American to win the Pulitzer Prize, and also the first off-Broadway play to win the award. From 1970 to 1977, it toured nationally, with the author as director for all three separate companies. The play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and been performed in regional and college theatre productions.

Cast: 5 female, 12 male

What people say:

"Charles Gordone's No Place to Be Somebody … seemed to grow in theatrically, raw energy, power and stature …. The denizens of johnny's bar, like those of harry hope's saloon in The Iceman Cometh, are waiting for a fulfillment of their dreams, which are illusions, and in some cases delusions … its humor is full of bile. On one level this was an extraordinarily funny play and it now seems even funnier in the most malicious way … No Place to Be Somebody is a drama of great force and commitment, one that must be seen – wherever it is playing. If nothing else – and there is much else – Gordone has a marvelous talent for dialogue, for bitter epithets and insults; for confrontations (each one a striking set piece); for small details that reveal character … and for creating whole and vivid characters." — The New York Times

"What makes a play worth reviving? First, of course, the quality of the play itself. ...It is precisely because this playwright is not afraid to see life through the very wide lens of a very candid camera that No Place to Be Somebody, for all its overt histrionics and blatant melodrama, achieves and retains the stature that it does. It is, as it was, a vividly expressed adventure story enhanced by the playwright's clear-eyed vision of life as he saw it." — Los Angeles Times

"Rarely, performed these days, Gordone's 1969 No Place to Be Somebody is an exciting mixture of sublime poetry, rough urban dialogue, and a wickedly engrossing plot. It perfectly conjures the atmosphere of Johnny's Bar, the ... dive where small-time hood Johnny Williams runs rackets and a prostitution ring while scheming to form his own black Mafia." — Chicago Reader

About the Playwright:

Charles Edward Gordone (born Charles Edward Fleming, 1925-1995) was an American playwright, actor, director, and educator. He was the first African American to win the annual Pulitzer Prize for Drama and he devoted much of his professional life to advance the cause of a theatre that was multi-racial like himself (he was of African-American, Native American, and European heritage). Despite his short if brilliant period as a playwright, he worked in the theatre throughout his career. He first made his mark as an actor, winning an Obie Award in 1953 in an all-Black production of Of Mice And Men. He was also in the cast of the 1961-1966 production of Jean Genet's The Blacks, sharing the stage with James Earl Jones, Cicely Tyson and Maya Angelou. In addition to lecturing at colleges and community theatres across the US, he taught English and theatre for nine years at Texas A&M University, which had been segregated for 100 years, up until 1963.