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The Spook Show
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(1949, 1950, 1954, 1955)?-BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATIONThe date of Caryn E. Johnson's birth ranges from November 13, 1949 to November 13, 1955. However, what most sources agree on is that she was raised with her brother Clyde by her mother in a housing project in the Chelsea section of Manhattan. She began acting at the age of 8 in children's plays with the Hudson Guild Theatre. By the late 1960s she had dropped out of the NY School for the Performing Arts to become a hippy. After leaving school she performed in the chorus of various musicals. She also married, had a daughter, and developed a heroin habit. In the 1970s she divorced, kicked her heroin habit, and left the East Coast for California. In San Diego, she became one of the founding members of the San Diego Repertory Theatre. She also worked with an improv theatre group called Spontaneous Combustion. It was during this time that Johnson changed her name to Whoopi Goldberg. By the late 1970s she had moved to Berkeley and begun performing with the Blake Street Hawkeyes Theater, a comedic avant garde troupe. She also worked as a bricklayer, a bank teller, and a morturary cosmetologist. It was in Berkeley that she began performing the monologues that would become The Spook Show. The piece toured Europe and the United States and was first performed in New York City as part of the New York Dance Theatre Workshop in 1983 where it and Goldberg came to the attention of veteran stage and screen director Mike Nichols. Nichols approached Goldberg about doing a one woman show on Broadway. Instead she returned to Berkeley to start in Moms, a one woman play co-written by Goldberg and Ellen Sebastian. In 1984 she returned to New York to perform The Spook Show now renamed Whoopi Goldberg. Since then Goldberg has gone on to star in numerous films including The Color Purple and Ghost which garnered her an Academy Award making her only the second African American woman to win an Oscar. In 1986 Goldberg, Billy Crystal, and Robin Williams began hosting Comic Relief to raise money for the homeless. She has also starred in such plays as Love Letters and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. In addition to her film, stage, and television work, Goldberg has also written a children's book, Alice and an autobiography entitled Book. Currently she occupies the center square on television's "Hollywood Squares". PLAYS
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CRITICAL/BIOGRAPHICAL RESOURCESFor full citations of the books listed, follow the links to the Resources Page. Books marked with book covers or a Dictionary of Twentieth Century Culture v.5
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are linked to an Amazon.com record.
