Orlandersmith - Beautys daughter ; Monster ; The gimmick: three plays

Powerful. She brings a livid intensity to her characters that would shock if it were not fraught with devotion.

The Village Voice

Courageous. [Monster is] an album of voices demanding to be heard. [Orlandersmith] has a journalists devotion to detachment and accuracy and a playwrights love of showmanship and poetry.

The New York Times

Stunning. [The Gimmick] sparks and burns and rages like the anguished truth. Orlandersmith leads us through a labyrinth of longing, hurt, wonder, and fury. [She] balances sturdy storytelling with language that flows from the lush and impressionistic to the graphic and gritty.

The Seattle Times

[The Gimmicks] incantatory, repetitive language heightens the almost hallucinatory effect as she describes the lurid colors of life in the ghetto. Driving its overflowing torrent of language is the desire to turn painful and ugly truth into something beautiful.

Daily Variety Gotham

Beautys Daughter [is] a triumph really wonderful. [Orlandersmith] leaves an audience gasping, crying, cursing, cheering.

The Amsterdam News

Dael Orlandersmith presented her first play, Liar, Liar, in New York in 1994, and since then has written several others, including Beautys Daughter, which appeared at the American Place Theatre and won an Obie Award in 1995, and Monster, which was presented to critical acclaim at the New York Theatre Workshop in 1996. She performed her one-woman play The Gimmick at the New York Theatre Workshop in 1999. In the fall of 1999, Orlandersmith began a year in residence at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, to develop her play Trickbabies.

A VINTAGE ORIGINAL, OCTOBER 2000
FIRST EDITION

Copyright 2000 by Dael Orlandersmith

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, and A. P. Watt Ltd. for permission to reprint He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven from The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, Revised Second Edition, edited by Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 1996). Rights outside the United States administered by A. P. Watt Ltd., London, on behalf of Michael B. Yeats.

CAUTION: These plays are protected in whole, in part, or in any form, under the Copyright Laws of the United States of America, the British Empire, including the Dominion of Canada, and all other countries of the Copyright Union, and are subject to royalty. All rights, including professional, amateur, motion picture, recitation, radio, television, and public reading are strictly reserved. All inquiries concerning performance rights should be addressed to the authors agent: Berman, Boals & Flynn, 208 West 30th Street, Suite 401, New York, NY 10001.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Orlandersmith, Dael.
[Plays. Selections]
Beautys daughter ; Monster ; The gimmick : three plays /
Dael Orlandersmith. 1st ed.
p. cm.
A Vintage originalT.p. verso.
eISBN: 978-0-307-48205-1
1. Afro-American womenDrama. I. Title: Beautys daughter ; Monster ; The gimmick. II. Orlandersmith, Dael. Monster. III. Orlandersmith, Dael. Gimmick. IV.
Title: Monster. V. Title: Gimmick. VI. Title.

PS3565.R5734 B43 2000
812.54dc21 00-034946

www.vintagebooks.com

v3.1

Id like to dedicate this book to my brother, Osceola Fletcher,
my aunt Marion Thomas,
Peter Askin, alchemist/director/great friend,
and to the memory of my mother, Beula Brown,
who makes me wrestle my demons.

Ive often been asked, Do you consider yourself primarily an actor, a performance artist, or a writer? My reply is that Im an actor who writes and a writer who acts, and I hope I do both well.

I began keeping a journal when I was roughly eight years old. Ideas, thoughts, poems rushed at me even then. I had the need to put things on paper. I was aware of the sensationthe actual, physical sensationof paper and pen: how they felt and the need to connect with them.

It was at this age that I also began to read voraciously and became interested in acting. For a child growing up in 1960s New York, specifically Harlem, with its extreme violence and poverty, there were very few outlets to encourage and nurse these needs. I retreated to the Bobbsey Twins mysteries and the 4:30 movie of the week, where I watched Brando, Sidney Poitier, Anna Magnani, and others. As I read novels and acted out the scenes I saw on television, I was fully aware, even then, that there were very few black people in these movies and that not many of the books in my schools curriculum were written by black writers.

A few years later, indeed, black and Hispanic writers became part of the schools curriculum. Writers such as Claude Brown and Piri Thomas validated and confirmed what many of us dealt with on a day-to-day basis. The school system in Harlem was poorsocioeconomically, and therefore academically, and many people sent their children to Catholic schools for better education. The Catholic school system in Harlem (which, may I add, was and still is extremely expensive) tried to incorporate what was going on at the time and, more, tried to dissuade us (though many of its methods of teaching were quite severe) from falling prey to the streets. The writers we were exposed to confirmed what we knew but also showed us what we could bewhat Emily Dickinson refers to as vast possibility.

As I grew older, my repertoire of writers and actors broadened. I began to read Rimbaud, Toni Morrison, and James Baldwin. I read about Dorothy Dandridge, Marlene Dietrich, James Dean, Marlon Brando. By that time, I also became crazy for rock n roll. Id always been a music lover, and the music I grew up withAretha, the Motown Sound, Billie Holiday, Joe Cuba, Desmond Dekker, Mighty Sparrow, Stax Volt, and the Philly soundconstantly played in my house and neighborhood. People would put their record players in the windows on Saturday summer nights, and people would dance, laugh, drink, and inevitably fight.

I loved those records, but it wasnt until I heard Jimi Hendrix, Steppenwolf, Arthur Lee and Love, the Who, the Rolling Stones, and the Doors that something clicked. By the time I was thirteen, in late 1972, Morrison and Hendrix had been dead for two yearsHendrix dying in 1970 and Morrison in 1971. When they were touring, I had constantly heard their names but never really knew their work. After seeing footage of them and listening to them on the radio, I bought everything on record that I could afford. For hours not only did I try to act out the scenes in movies before my mirror but Id also play air guitar trying to imitate Hendrix. Or pretend I was wearing leather pants and slinking across the stage like the Lizard King. Id put on sunglasses trying to do John Kay of Steppenwolf, and Id pout my lips and flap my arms like Jagger and pretend to lean into a microphone like Arthur Lee.