EVANS
DONNELL was bitten by the theater bug while attending a
play in Nashville more than 30 years ago, and he's happy he never
got over it.
He's been an actor, first in community
theater and then on the professional stage, where he
was honored to earn his Actors' Equity Association card. He's done
everything from musicals and modern dramas to Shakespeare and Shaw
during his time on the boards.
Evans also performed on camera in
television shows such as UNSOLVED MYSTERIES (earning his Screen Actors
Guild card on an episode of that series) and in films
such as THE PEOPLE VS LARRY FLYNT and FALSE PROPHETS. He has been a
member of the guild's Nashville Branch Council and served on various
national Screen Actors Guild committees.
He founded AthensSouth Theatre in 1997,
and produced or directed shows for that group until its demise in
2001.
Evans has an extensive journalism
background too, having worked in full-time or part-time capacities
for various media outlets since 1985. He formerly
covered politics, education, the legal system and sports.
In October 2002, he was very
happy to begin reviewing theater for The Tennessean when Kevin
Nance, then the paper's theater and dance writer, gave him the
opportunity to write about his favorite subject. He has also
reviewed the Nashville Symphony and the Nashville
Opera for the paper. In January 2006, Evans became a
correspondent for Back Stage as
well.
Evans was a critic-fellow for the 2004 O'Neill Critics
Institute. He attended the program at the Eugene
O'Neill Theater Center in
Waterford, Connecticut under the Clara Hieronymus Scholarship. The
OCI is annually directed by former Los
Angeles Times chief theater critic Dan Sullivan
and was conducted in July during the center's 40th anniversary
playwrights' conference.
He was also a fellow for the NEA Arts Journalism Institute in Theater and Musical
Theater at the USC
Annenberg School for Communication in Los Angeles from
January 9-20, 2006. That program is led by author, critic and USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Fellowship
Program founding director Sasha Anawalt.
Evans is proud to be a member of the American Theatre Critics Association, which
was founded at the O'Neill Theater Center in 1974. He is a past
chairman of its communications committee.
In 2007 Evans took a leave of absence
from reviewing to be the media director/scheduler for former
Nashville Vice Mayor Howard Gentry's campaign for mayor. He later
briefly worked as Gentry's assistant when Gentry became the CEO of
the Public Benefit Foundation of the Nashville Area Chamber of
Commerce in the fall of that year.
He holds bachelor and master degrees
in business administration, and has operated his own small business,
Donnell Enterprises, for the past 13 years.
Evans has been married since 1994 to the
lovely Ann Stathos of Mountain Brook, Alabama. They and their
beautiful nine-year-old daughter Katie reside with two cats and a
dog near the Vanderbilt University campus in Nashville,
Tennessee. Evans' e-mail is evans@stagecritic.com. |