Beauty's Daughter, Monster, The Gimmick: Three Plays

By Dael Orlandersmith

The sheer exuberance of language that pours forth in Dael Orlandersmith's plays has dazzled critics and audiences alike. In these three pieces, the award-winning writer and performer celebrates the power of words to rescue the young black women she portrays from their constricted worlds. In the Obie Award-winning play "Beauty's Daughter," Diane yearns to free herself from her soul-deadening surroundings, where people drown their unfulfilled aspirations in drugs and alcohol. In "Monster," Theresa imagines a life in the rock-'n'-roll poetry bohemia of Manhattan's Lower East Side and away from her home in East Harlem, where she is scorned as a misfit. And in "The Gimmick," Alexis escapes her brutal reality among the library bookshelves, where she dreams of becoming a writer in Paris. Charged with fearless wisdom, these three electrifying plays transform rage-filled ghetto experience into a triumph of rhapsodic expression.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0375708715
• ISBN13: 9780375708718
• Release Date: October 2000
• Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
• Length: 128 Pages
• Weight: 0.38 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.2" x 8.0"