STAGE WEST: OnWord Theatre's "Beauty's Daughter"

 Marti Gobel in "Beauty's Daughter."                                                                Photo by Bernadette Johnson

            Dael Orlandersmith’s “Beauty’s Daughter” may be set in the Harlem of the 1990s, but considering the often-tragic world in which we all reside, the setting could be anywhere, and there’s something personal of the one-person play’s protagonist, Diane, in each of us.
            The same could be said for the characters whose grueling lives swirl around Diane, all portrayed by Marti Gobel in OnWord Theatre’s West Coast premiere of the 1995 “Beauty’s Daughter.”
OnWord is completing its first-ever season with this staging that stars co-founder Gobel and is directed by another, Danielle Bunch. Next year will mark its first full season with six productions scheduled beginning with one of Adam Rapp’s “Red Light Winter.”
            The 80-minute “Beauty’s Daughter,” which is being performed in Diversionary Theatre’s upstairs Black Box space, is aching in its honesty and its pain, yet somehow, through Gobel’s inhabiting of the tormented but resilient Diane, is an empowering declaration of self and spirit.
             The tiny Black Box space means that Gobel and the characters she’s playing are as close to you as they must have been to playwright Orlandersmith, who wrote a script (which she originally performed herself) that is as raw and tough as the streets but more than often lyrical and touching. The recorded spoken-word interludes directed by Dana King that are heard during Gobel’s costume changes echo with hard-hewn insight, defiance, the self-realization of a fighter and a survivor.
          “Beauty’s Daughter” opens with Gobel as 31-year-old Diane, preoccupied initially with a misguided dalliance with an Irishman who ultimately tells her, with a terseness not characteristic of an Irishman, that he doesn’t love her. This is only the entry point into Diane’s battle-tested soul.
            What ensues are the arrival and departure of those who must be wearing on her, in some cases haunting her.
            A streetwise Puerto Rican teenager, Papo, begs Diane to write an important term paper for him, initially flattering her in his swaggering way before, when refused, giving her a double dose of the middle finger.
           The most tender shadow is Mary, who is more mother to Diane than her real mother could ever be (we intuit this even before Beauty appears later). Mary’s imagining herself freed from the trials of old age and suddenly upright and 15 years old again with a life unlived ahead of her, proves to be one of Gobel’s most moving turns.
          Diane has a surrogate father in Louis, the blind drug addict who beckons to her from somewhere on the street. His recriminations and resentments are sheathed in a pitiful plea for help – change or folded money, whatever she can – and in his mind – should feed to him.
           There’s a degree of comic relief in Gobel’s transition to the unhappily married young man Anthony, a strutting poser who artlessly tries to pick up on her in a bar. It turns out the two of them share a passion for and an escape into the impetuosity of jazz music – but reality in the form of Anthony’s unwanted wife intrudes.
          The irony of the play’s title manifests itself in Beauty, Diane’s bitter, pathetically alcoholic mother, sprawled on the floor, swigging from Johnny Walker Black, a mean martyr who regards through sodden eyes her only child as a failure and someone who robbed she herself of just about everything.
           Diane returns to deliver a poetical denouement, bound to reconcile the past and the present. It’s a nearly sanguine coda to the sadness that preceded it.
          Gobel’s sensitivity, strength and versatility are all on display in what is a grand performance with just the right touch of restraint. Given the intimate environs of the Black Box, we’re practically in her head with her, and she is the light that shows us the way out of the darkness.
         “Beauty’s Daughter” runs through Nov. 30 at Diversionary Theatre’s Black Box in University Heights.