No Place to Be Somebody
- Dates
- Dec 30, 1969 – Jan 10, 1970
- Performances
- 16
About
No Place to Be Somebody is a 1969 play written by American playwright Charles Gordone. It was during his employment as a bartender in Greenwich Village that Gordone found the inspiration for his first major work, No Place to Be Somebody, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Gordone's Pulitzer signified two "firsts": he was the first African American playwright to receive a Pulitzer, and No Place to Be Somebody was the first off-Broadway play to receive the award. 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 "abo...