Don Evans - Theatre

Theatre

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. 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, 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, New Jersey.