OnWord Theatre’s ‘Beauty’s Daughter’ a challenging piece for an actor
Having marked in August one year since its founding, fledgling OnWord Theatre is winding up 2025 with its second fully staged production, the West Coast premiere of Dael Orlandersmith’s one-person play “Beauty’s Daughter.”
The role of Diane, a writer in East Harlem trying to reconcile the scars of her past — largely inflicted by her mother — with the personal struggles and discoveries of the present is “a big old actor sandwich” for OnWord producing artistic director Marti Gobel, who founded OnWord with Danielle Bunch and Jamaelya Hines. “It’s a phenomenally gritty, raw script.”
Orlandersmith’s Obie Award-winning 1995 play calls for its actor to portray six different people, including the Diane character. The others, all constituting relationships of some sort or brief encounters in Diane’s life, including an aged neighbor, a man she meets at a wedding and her own alcoholic, mean-spirited mother, Beauty.
“They don’t communicate with each other,” Gobel said of the arc of the solo show. “These are monologues, almost like vignettes. Each one is sandwiched with spoken word poetry (also written by Orlandersmith, who began as a spoken word artist and who starred in “Beauty’s Daughter” herself when it was first staged).
OnWord’s Bunch, who is directing, said “There’s a throughline because it all stems from Diane’s life and experiences. You learn very quickly that she’s got to protect her heart and her sanity, and at the same time these are very isolated characters.
“Even though we have the single instrument that is Marti, they are very different people,” Bunch said.
This production of “Beauty’s Daughter” marks a return to the past for Gobel. She launched her former Milwaukee company Uprooted Theatre in 2009 with “Beauty’s Daughter” and portrayed Diane then.
“It started for me a trend,” said Gobel. “I went on to do nine one-person shows. I’m comfortable in that space.”
Diversionary Theatre’s Black Box is the space for this production of “Beauty’s Daughter,” an intimate setting where, Bunch said, Gobel and the characters she plays are all that is needed.
“We don’t need to cartwheel across the stage to make it interesting,” Bunch said. “We can let the words and the character that are so larger than life live and exist in their truth onstage.”
Gobel describes “Beauty’s Daughter” as “kind of a memory play. You meet Diane where she’s at. Then she talks about how she got there. It starts when she’s 16 and then it’s one terrible day where three people are talking about the same vent that shaped Diane. Then you understand where she gets devastated and decides that there’s hope for her younger self.”
The spoken word segments are “the inner workings of Diane’s thoughts,” Gobel said. “They are literally pieces of her journal. They touch on where she has been, where she is now (35 at the time of the play). They’re more just a bridge. They explain why she has to move in the world the way that she does.
“They highlight the rhythm of her heart.”
Bunch said that OnWord’s choice of “Beauty’s Daughter” was a natural.
“I think this play really encompasses what our name is,” she said. “It’s a wordy script that’s gritty and yet beautifully poetic and it speaks to the ways that we have to just deal with the world around us. There are a lot of parallels people will find to their own personal lives.”
‘Beauty’s Daughter’
When: Opens at 4 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 15, and runs through Nov. 30. 7 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays; 4 p.m. Saturdays; 2 p.m. Sundays
Where: OnWord Theatre at Diversionary Theatre’s BlackBox, 4545 Park Blvd., #101, San Diego
Tickets: $33.29-$43.89
Phone: 619-892-8123
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