| Don Evans | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1938 - 2003 Merchantville, NJ, US |
| Spouse(s) | Frances Gooding Chapman (divorced) |
Don Evans (Donald Thomas Evans) was a noted African-American playwright, theatre director, actor and educator.
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Born on April 27, 1938 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Don Evans was an only child, raised by his mother, Mary Evans. After serving in the United States Marine Corps, he attended Cheyney State College in Westown, Pennsylvania, where he majored in secondary English Education. He then studied at Temple University, where he earned two degrees - an M.A. in Education and an M.F.A. in Theatre Arts. In 1971 Evans began teaching at Trenton State College (now The College of New Jersey), where he chaired the Afro-American Studies Department from 1971 to 1983. During this time, Evans directed such plays as The Taking of Miss Janie by Ed Bullins and August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. He also taught courses in African American literature & drama, jazz, and playwriting. Evans was a visiting professor at nearby Rutgers University and Princeton University, and worked from 19978-1998 with his friend and fellow playwright August Wilson in forming the Black Theatre Summit at Dartmouth University, from which was formed the African Grove Institute for the Arts.
Don Evans studied acting, directing, and playwriting at the Hagen-Berghof Studios in New York City from 1969 to 1970, during which time he also taught English and Drama at Princeton High School in Princeton, New Jersey. An integral part of the Black Arts movement of the 1970s, Evans had his first plays, the one acts Orrin and Sugarmouth Sam Don’t Dance No More performed in 1972 at the Crossroads Theatre, a professional playhouse in New Brunswick, New Jersey. In 1976 he wrote It’s Showdown Time, a raucous adaptation of William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew.[1] In 1978, Evans wrote Mahalia, his first musical, a portrait of Gospel vocalist Mahalia Jackson. Louis, Evans' musical portrayal of jazz legend Louis Armstrong, was written in 1981. Other works include The Trials and Tribulations of Staggerlee Booker T. Brown, One Monkey Don't Stop No Show a tragi-comic look at a middle-class black family, and A Lovesong for Miss Lydia, [2] described by the New York Times as "a Pinteresque encounter of two elderly people." Evans wrote his final play, When Miss Mollie Hit the Triple Bars, in 1999. It was based on the life of his mother, Mary.
Over the course of his career, Don Evans received playwriting fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New Jersey Council of the Arts, and the New Jersey Historical Society. Evans has a total of six plays in publication, and a total of eighteen have been produced the world over, in such countries as Germany, England and Hong Kong. He also served, from 1983 to 1988, as artistic director for the Karamu House in Cleveland, Ohio. Don Evans was honored as AMPARTS Fellow for the United States Information Agency to India in 1984. He died at the age of 65 of a heart attack on October 16, 2003 at his home in Merchantville, N.J.
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