Evans Donnell

Edward Evans Donnell was born at 2:02 a.m. on Sunday, Aug. 21, 1966, in the old Vanderbilt Hospital building in Nashville, Tenn. He arrived two months before his due date and weighed a little over three pounds at birth. His parents Comer Lewis Donnell and Anne Alice (Evans) Donnell (both born in 1940; father died in 2019) raised Evans and his younger brother John Comer "Jack" Donnell (born 1968) in nearby Lebanon, Tenn. Evans attended Lebanon's Byars-Dowdy Elementary School for grades 1-6 and then spent grades 7-12 at Friendship Christian School near Lebanon, gaining his high school diploma there in 1984. After high school he attended the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, Cumberland University, Volunteer State Community College, Middle Tennessee State University and Tennessee State University at various times in the 1980s and 1990s. (Years later he returned to college coursework, gaining a Bachelor of Arts in Business Administration [Management Specialization] in 2003 from Saint Leo University in Florida and then adding a Master of Business Administration [Global Technology emphasis] degree for coursework that same year with American InterContinental University.) Shortly after starting college he began his journalism career in 1985 as a staff writer with the Lebanon (Tenn.) Democrat. In that career (which in its early stages focused on news and then sports reporting) Evans wrote reviews and features about theater, opera and classical music for The Tennessean from 2002 to 2011. He was the theater, film and opera critic for ArtNowNashville.com from 2011 to 2012 and for ArtsNash.com from 2012 to 2014. Evans has also contributed to The Sondheim Review, Back Stage, The City Paper (Nashville), the Nashville Banner, The (Bowling Green, Ky.) Daily News and several other publications over the past three decades. He was selected as a fellow for the 2004 National Critics Institute at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center. He was later picked for National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) arts journalism institutes for theater and musical theater at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism in 2006 and classical music and opera at the Columbia University School of Journalism in 2009. He is a member of the American Theatre Critics Association. During his childhood Evans began performing onstage with Lebanon's resident community theater, Sound & Light Theater Company, in such plays as "Life With Father," "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "Oliver!". In 1989 Evans won a spot in the professional theater training program at Tennessee Repertory Theatre (now Nashville Repertory Theatre) and spent the 1989-1990 season taking classes with lead instructor Mary Jane Harvill while appearing in mainstage productions of such shows as "Romeo and Juliet" and "My Fair Lady" with the Actors Equity Association-affiliated company. Appearances there and elsewhere paved the way for him to join AEA through its membership candidate program. He founded and ran AthensSouth Theatre in Nashville from 1996 to 2001, which included his producing and directing the Southeastern U.S. premiere of Sir David Hare's "Skylight" in 1998. Evans earned his Screen Actors Guild (now SAG-AFTRA) card in 1992 while filming scenes for an "Unsolved Mysteries" NBC-TV episode. In 1995 after a final audition with two-time Academy Award-winning director Milos Forman ("One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", "Amadeus") he was cast in "The People vs Larry Flynt" as a divinity student at Liberty University in that Columbia Pictures production. He also went on to appear as Bert, a beleaguered meat-and-three restaurant manager, in a 2006 Lifetime movie called "False Prophets" with Patrick Bergin ("Sleeping With the Enemy") and Lori Heuring ("Mulholland Drive"). Evans has been married since 1994 to Ann Antigone Stathos from Mountain Brook, Ala. They have a daughter, Katherine Galina Donnell, who was born in 1999. The three share a house in Nashville with two dogs and four cats.