
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, November 19, 1995                   TAG: 9511200045
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: B-3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Short

PIONEER GORDONE DIES AT 70

Charles Gordone, who pioneered a polemical form of race-conscious theater with a blistering drama that made him the first black playwright to win the Pulitzer Prize, died Friday at his home in College Station, Texas. He was 70.

The cause was cancer, said his former wife, Jeanne Warner.

Gordone, an elegant man who had the copper-colored skin of a Native American and favored eccentric hats and rainbow love beads, was fond of telling interviewers that he was ``part Indian, part Irish, part French and part nHe was born in Cleveland reared in Elkhart, Ind., and moved to New York City in 1952.

A struggling actor, Gordone found work - and the material for the first play he had written, ``No Place to Be Somebody'' - as a waiter at Johnny Romero's bar in Greenwich Village.

The play told the story of a black bartender named Johnny, a hustler who tries to hoodwink his way out of small-time swindles by fighting the white mob, but winds up shot and forced to close down his saloon.

The play was produced on Broadway and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1970.

But with so much success crowded into one year of his life, Gordone set a standard for himself that the rest of his career never again approximated.

In the late 1980s, he weighed in on the controversial concept of nontraditional casting, arguing that minority actors should be included in realistic American plays.

In addition to his writing, Gordone, up until recently, was a member of the faculty at Texas A&M University in College Station.

by CNB