| Beauty's Daughter, Monster, The Gimmick: Three Plays Contributor(s): Orlandersmith, Dael (Author) |
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ISBN: 0375708715 ISBN-13: 9780375708718 Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group OUR PRICE: $19.00 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: October 2000 Annotation: 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. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Drama | American - African American - Drama | Women Authors - Literary Collections | Women Authors |
| Dewey: 812.54 |
| LCCN: 00034946 |
| Physical Information: 0.41" H x 5.22" W x 7.98" (0.30 lbs) 128 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: In this guided tour of the tenements and street corners of an American netherworld, Diane is a vibrant young woman growing up in East Harlem and encountering a panoply of characters -- from an Irish boyfriend and a married lover to an elderly Holocaust survivor and a drug-addicted friend -- who represent the dead ends she is desperate to evade. In this one-woman show, Orlandersmith brings to life Theresa, a bright young girl infatuated with William Butler Yeats and David Bowie and determined to transcend her house of pain, as well as the vivid chorus of relatives, friends and neighbors who surround her. A solo piece that vividly evokes the street life of New York in the '70s and a young woman's struggle to escape her soul-deadening environment. The play tells the story of two childhood friends, a pair of Harlem misfits: Alexis, who yearns to be a writer, and Jimmy, who wants to be an artist. Both find refuge in their aspirations from the taunts of neighborhood kids and the withering verbal abuse of their parents, but as they grow older their lives take dramatically different turns. |