No Place
to Be Somebody (1969)
Playbill for No Place to Be Somebody, 1969Charles Gordone (Playwright)
30 December, 1969 – 10 January, 1970
Written over the course of seven years, the play explores racial tensions in a Civil Rights-era story about a black bartender who tries to outsmart a white mobster syndicate. In his final speech, in June 1995, delivered at the Museum of the American West in Los Angeles, Gordone described the play as being “about country folk who had migrated to the big city, seeking the urban myth of success, only to find disappointment, despair, and death.” No Place to Be Somebody is the first play by an African-American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama as well as the first play to win during an off-broadway run.
