TCNJ News
For Immediate Release
October 9, 2006
Newly-formed TCNJ Theatrical Group to Perform
Don Evans’ One Monkey Don't Stop No Show
EWING, NJ … The Don Evans-Langston Hughes Players, a new theatrical organization at The College of New Jersey, will perform a revival of One Monkey Don’t Stop No Show, written by Don Evans, playwright and former professor at the College. The production is a joint effort of alumni of the Langston Hughes Players, an African-American theater company founded by Don Evans in the early 1970s to provide a venue for African-American theater at the college, current students, and the Department of African-American Studies.
After Evans’ untimely death three years ago, former students proposed the project as a way to rejuvenate the theater company and to support an endowment created at the College in Don Evans’ honor. The performance will be the first Evans production on campus in at least two decades. It will feature alumni of the original Langston Hughes Players as well as current students.
The show will run from Thursday, October 26, 2006, to Saturday, October 28, 2006, at 8:00 p.m., with a special fundraising performance and reception on Sunday, October 29, 2006, at 3:00 p.m. Tickets for evening performances are $7 for students, $10 for faculty, and $15 general admission. Tickets for the benefit performance and reception are $35. The reception will offer audience members an opportunity to honor the legacy of Don Evans through a donation to the Don Evans Endowment Fund, and to meet the cast and director of the show. For more information please call: 609.771.3434 or 609.771.2138.
Don Evans’ play is a comedic love story that revolves around the upwardly mobile African-American family of Reverend Avery Harrison and his wife Myra, and their tenacious attempt to move up in Black elite society in Philadelphia during the late 1970s. The play twists and turns, with subplots involving Myra’s attempts to obscure her low-class origins and their strictly reared private-school-educated son, Felix, who falls in love with Lil’ Bits, a young woman who does not possess his “pedigree” or fit into the family’s plans for his future. To add even more confusion to this comedy, Avery’s “countrified” niece, Beverly, arrives from down south after her father, Avery’s brother dies. She comes north because her father has arranged that she be cared for by Caleb, a cool, sophisticate who co-owned a jazz club with Beverly’s father. Chaos prevails when Caleb meets Beverly and realizes that the “kid” he thought he was responsible for is really a grown woman who is not as “dumb” as he thinks she is.
Directors of the production are Pamela Chambers and Fran Thomas, alumni of the Langston Hughes Players. They have assembled a very talented cast, which includes Anna English Reeves, former member of the Langston Hughes Players as Mrs. Caldwell, and Joseph Jackson, former member of the Players’ Company, the spin-off company of the Langston Hughes Players, as Avery Harrison. Pierre Downing rounds out the cast as Caleb Johnson. Students from The College of New Jersey who belong to the newly formed Don Evans-Langston Hughes Players include Shauwn Hines and Troy Torres as Felix, Evette Barnes as Mozelle, Mercedes McCurdy as Myra Harrison, Jasmine Rodriguez as Lil' Bits, and Tasia Chambers Hickman as Beverly Harrison, all members of the Don Evans-Langston Hughes Players.
Professor Donald T. Evans (1938-2003) studied at Cheney University and Temple University (MA and MFA) and also at Hagen-Berghof Studios in New York City. In 1971 he was hired by The College of New Jersey as special assistant to the president and then as professor of African-American Studies, which he chaired from 1973 to 1983 and again from 1995-1998. In addition to teaching and publishing scholarship on African-American playwrights, Evans produced eighteen plays, six of which were published. He won fellowships in playwriting from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New Jersey Council of the Arts. He was an energetic promoter of the arts on campus, his legacy honored by an endowment in his name.
One Monkey Don’t Stop No Show is presented by the School of Culture and Society, the Department of African American Studies, and the Don Evans-Langston Hughes Players at The College of New Jersey.
About The College of New Jersey
TCNJ currently is ranked as one of the 75 "Most Competitive" schools in the nation by Barron's Profiles of American Colleges, is rated the No. 1 public institution in the northern region of the country by U.S. News & World Report, and is one of Kiplinger's Personal Finance's top educational values in the country. In 2006, the College joined an elite group of institutions when it was awarded a Phi Beta Kappa chapter. Fewer than 10 percent of the nation's colleges and universities share this honor.
