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Don Evans
I still have trouble with dates. Things happened sometime before yesterday or maybe they're happening right now but, to me, they all come together as chunks of the past. There is an order to my recollections, but it is seldom based in calendar-logic so I am hard pressed to say exactly when things occurred. Like, I remember when I first met Alice but I can't tell you the year or day, except that it was summer. I was fresh out of graduate school, armed with a degree that told the world I was supposed to know something about this thing we called "The Theater." Somewhere during the last of my days as a student, I had determined that I had the skills to become a scholarly researcher and would concentrate my attentions on the contributions of Black artists in mainstream American Theater. My university education had contributed little in the way of background information on the subject but it had given me some insight as to the methods to be employed if I were to unearth of whys and wherefores of colored folks in and on "The Great White Way." These methods, however, proved to be of little use because few people had actually taken the time to record the work in which I was interested. Doris Abrams and a few others had written books that could be used to prove that we had been there but they said very little about who we were and what our work actually meant. I needed first-hand information. I needed to talk to the people who knew the people and, wherever possible, were the people.
The list of those to be contacted seemed long and I was having little success in finding any of them. The tried and true methods of academic research were not working The black playwrights of the fifties had disappeared and their scripts (so important to my study) were not available
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at local libraries. I was frustrated. And then one day, riding the commuter train from my home in New Jersey to New York it came to me to try something new. If my subjects were not available to me in the libraries or bookshops, use the telephone directory. To be...