GORDONE’S WIN, ‘PLACE’ AND SHOWS

In 1970, playwright Charles Gordone won a Pulitzer Prize for “No Place to Be Somebody”--and died.

Spiritually, that is.

“I died into a new life,” said the dapper 61-year-old writer/director, recently in town to look in on rehearsals for a revival of “No Place,” which opens tonight at the Matrix. “After I wrote that play, there was a death moment. It was over. It was purged. Then I proceeded to live again.

“The celebrity disease? I had that. Anyone who’s ever had a hand in Hollywood or Broadway does. It’s all around you. But I walked away.”

And kept walking. Since his early success with “No Place,” Gordone has not produced another play, devoting most of his time to teaching and directing. (In August, he is off to join the theater faculty at Texas A&M; University.) His own studies began at Los Angeles City College in the ‘40s, where he “was the only person of color in the deparment.

“I was studying everything anybody else was: Shakespeare, Strindberg, Pirandello; I was very much grounded in the classics. But every time I was cast in a show, it was in a stereotypical role. After a while, I rebelled: I refused to play insignificant, ‘utility’ parts.”

Gordone wrote an article in the school paper, met with the deparment head--and things changed. “They began to cast me in roles that were logical, historical and substantial. I’m too small to play Othello, but I played him anyway.”

He is still tampering with unorthodox casting. For five years, Gordone directed the Berkeley-based American Stage--”which it truly was. Not all white, not all black.

“We did ‘Night of the Iguana,’ ‘Of Mice and Men,’ ‘Streetcar Named Desire.’ See, I come out of New Orleans, and I don’t know many Poles in the French Quarter. A lot of people have suggested that Williams wanted to write the part of Stanley as a black man, but at the time it just wasn’t cool.

“So I cast a fair-skinned Creole in the role--black enough to insult Blanche. And audiences accepted it very well. It’s all how you cast it. Blacks are just as splintered in terms of type, color, hue, background. (The color choice) is not for shock value. I don’t believe in that--or blind casting, where there’s no regard for the person’s ethnicity. I would never cast a blond woman with black children.”

Gordone is especially sensitive to blacks in academe: the notion of quotas, of letting blacks slip through with inferior grades, black studies that promote separatism. “When they come out of college, blacks should be able to fit into the community, not be schizophrenic, paranoid about their color. There’s nothing wrong with saying, ‘I come from Africa.’ But if you want people to respect you, they’ve got to respect you as a human being, not as a black human being or a white human being.”

There is no hostility in Gordone’s words. But there used to be.

“Oh, indeed,” he said. “Certainly, when I wrote ‘No Place,’ I was very hostile. I was in a play in New York City, the original company of Jean Genet’s ‘The Blacks’--with Cecily Tyson, James Earl Jones, Louis Gossett, Roscoe Lee Browne, Maya Angelou. Everyone was angry in the ‘60s, and all the writers of color reflected that: the anger of the civil rights movement.

“After Martin Luther King (Jr.) died, things just piddled away. It was very placid in the ‘70s--then the conservatives came in in the ‘80s, and in many ways we’re right back where we started in the ‘60s.”

He said that “No Place” (set in a New York bar, with a mix of black and white characters) reflects America’s ongoing “problem with race--but does not deal with race per se. It’s bandied about, but principally the play deals with identity, the quest for it.

“My new play (“Roan Brown and Cherry,” which he has been working on for five years) is much more Chekhovian, more psychologically real. Again, race is not an issue. It’s just there--a subtle, underlying fact.”

In spite of his affection for “No Place,” Gordone said the time has probably come when he will stop playing watchful parent. (Over the years, he figured he has visited at least 200 regional and college productions of his work.) “It’s just a way of protecting your child. Now the play is 18 years old. I don’t think you ever really step away, because it’s a part of you. But it came out of a certain period in my life, long ago and far away. So now it’s on to Bigger and Better.”

Under the Pulitzer’s shadow?

Gordone sighed. “You do have the feeling that everything you write doesn’t seem good or better. I don’t know how other people handle it. I went through a whole psychological period of saying, ‘Forget about that: Just write as you are now. Stop trying to remember what you did, what aroused people then.’ You’ve just got to do your best, and that’s it. But yeah, a Pulitzer on your first play--it was like, ‘Wow! Really?’ Most people write for years before they get one. How’d it happen? I don’t try to figure those things out anymore.”

Gordone, you see, has become a man at peace with himself.

“I consider myself a consummate theater person,” he said simply. “I’ve lived a life in the theater; if I don’t know anything about it now, I never will. So yes, I’m very confident about that. I can hold my own with anybody in the theater--I have that reputation.”

A tough guy? “I was. But that’s part of the rejuvenation of Charles Gordone. Once you have confidence, you no longer have to defend it with a hard veneer. You don’t have to go around tooting your horn, having to fight for who you are. You just are. You have to accept yourself, love yourself. I think I’m a gas.”