Daughter
This play is included in the collection:
Play Description
Alma tries to reckon with injuries suffered by her beautiful daughter, Monique, while serving in the U.S. military in Iraq — injuries so severe that she no longer has a face.
Production Info
Cast: 4 total (4 female)Short Drama (about 40 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
- Reviews
- About the Author(s)
- About the Book
- Special Notes
- Productions
Press Quotes
“DAUGHTER is not only the best play of the five, but it’s also the most accomplished. Medley writes about an African American mother dealing with the suicide of her daughter after she returns home from Iraq having her face blown off. DAUGHTER is a deep, uncompromising play about faith.” —David Gordon, nytheatre.com
Author(s)
Cassandra MedleyCassandra Medley's most recently produced plays include: CELL, Ensemble Studio Theatre Marathon 2011, DAUGHTER, Ensemble Studio Theatre Marathon 2009, NOON DAY SUN, August, 2008, Diverse City Theatre Company — Theatre Row, New York City and RELATIVITY, a commission from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Ensemble Studio Theatre, 2004. RELATIVITY, produced by Kuntu Rep. of Pittsburg, Southern Rep. of New Orleans, 2007, the Ensemble Studio Theatre, May, 2006, the St. Louis Black Repertory Theatre – February, 2006, and the Magic Theatre in San Francisco in June, 2004. CELL is published in the anthology Outstanding One-Act Plays — 2012, Dramatists Play Service. DAUGHTER published by Broadway Play Publishing, 2012. RELATIVITY won the 2006 Audelco August Wilson Playwriting Award and was featured on Science Friday, National Public Radio, and published by Broadway Play Publishing. RELATIVITY was featured in online radio broadcast of the play, Los Angeles Repertory Theatre – February, 2008. NOON DAY SUN was nominated for the 2008 August Wilson Playwriting Award. NOON DAY SUN is published by Broadway Play Publishing, Marathon 2004-06. Ms. Medley has also the received the 2004 Going to the River Writers Life Achievement Award, 2002 Ensemble Studio Theatre 25th Anniversary Award for Theatre Excellence, the 2001 Theatrefest Regional Playwriting Award for Best Play, the 1995 New Professional Theatre Award, and the 1995 Marilyn Simpson Award. She was a 1989 finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Award in Playwriting and won the 1990 National Endowment for the Arts Playwright Award. She was the 1986 recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts Grant and a New York State Council on the Arts Grant for 1987. She teaches playwriting at Sarah Lawrence College, has taught at New York University, and has also served as guest artist at Columbia University, the University of Iowa Playwrights Workshop and Seattle University. Cassandra worked as a staff writer for ABC Television: One Life to Live – 1995 – 97. She is a playwright member of the Ensemble Studio Theatre, and New River Dramatists.
Special Notes
If original stage producers credits appear in bold below, all licensees are required to include them in the following form on the title page in all programs distributed in connection with performances of the Play and in all advertising in which the full cast appears in size of type not less than ten percent (10%) of the size of the title of the Play:
Originally produced as part of the Ensemble Studio Theatre's Marathon
In addition, the following must appear within all programs distributed in connection with performances of the Play:
by special arrangement with Broadway Play Publishing Inc, NYC
www.broadwayplaypub.com
Related Plays
$11.95–$15.00 Play Description
A PREFACE TO THE ALIEN GARDEN takes a hard look at the gangsta lifestyle in present-day Kansas City.
Production Info
Cast: 7 total (3 female, 4 male)Full Length Drama (about 110 minutes)
$15.00–$15.95 Play Description
Set in 1963, LAST DAYS OF THE HIGH FLIER is the story of a young man waiting for his life to begin, the mysterious ex-pilot who enters his life, and the intricate dance of friendship, betrayal, and forgiveness that takes place between the two men. Historically based, the story revolves around political conspiracies, including the CIA’s secret war in Laos. It also addresses personal struggles that occurred almost a half-century ago but still have relevance in an age in which intelligence failures and civil liberties threats dominate the news.
Production Info
Cast: 10 total (4 female, 6 male)Full Length Drama (about 130 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Contemporary Costumes
$11.95–$15.00 Play Description
Three years ago, Sarah Kennedy thought she was hired as a translator for a corporate military prison in Baghdad, only to discover that she would be acting as an interrogator instead, retrieving information from prisoners of war — by any means necessary. Now, Lily Strauss, a disgraced reporter in the waning days of newspaper journalism, must uncover Sarah's story, cutting through webs of corporate lies and government deception until finally faced with the choice between her own journalistic ideals and the devastating consequences of telling the truth. A political thriller, ON THE HEAD OF A PIN is an exploration of who watches the watchers and what happens when they look away.
Production Info
Cast: 9 total (5 female, 4 male)Full Length Drama (about 170 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00 Play Description
It is a few years after the end of World War II. Billy Maitland, a young wheelchair-bound ex-Army Corporal is the sole remaining patient in a VA hospital when a new patient, Flight Commander Simon Trevelyan, arrives — accompanied by his American ex-WAAF wife. When Billy, who worships FDR, discovers that his new fellow-patient was a former pilot in the Royal Air Force, he insists the cynical and disillusioned Simon join him in reliving the war, with Billy pretending to be FDR and Simon pretending to be Winston Churchill. In a time before PTSD was identified and when treatment for the effects of the horrors of war were little understood, their doctor thinks this play-acting might help them recover from the physical and mental traumas of their combat experiences. As the two servicemen's extremely different personal and historical stories unfold, HOTEL VICTORY portrays the aftereffects of battle and contrasts war as it is experienced by the Grand Figures of history vs. the way it is experienced by the men and women they send into the fight.
Production Info
Cast: 4 total (1 female, 3 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
Period Costumes
$11.95–$15.00 Play Description
In the future, after the global ecological disaster, so much that makes life worth living has been outlawed. One family refuses to submit. Will their small act of rebellion lead to a future where science no longer dominates humanity but serves it?
Production Info
Cast: 6 total (4 female, 2 male)Full Length Comedy (about 110 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95 Play Description
With an important piece of legislation pending, treatment for a serious illness about to begin, and engagement to a woman half his age in the balance, a first-term City Councilman in Washington, D.C. is visited by his two adult sons, the younger one a gay man who must find a way to come out to his father, the older one an ex-football star who’s been living out of the country and out of touch for nearly twenty years. Both sons, in addition, carry a long-held tacit agreement that is destined to explode in their father’s face.
Production Info
Cast: 6 total (2 female, 4 male)Full Length Drama (about 120 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95 Play Description
UNFINISHED WOMEN deals with the events in a home for unwed mothers on the last day of jazz musician Charlie Parker’s life, March 12, 1955. The play digs beyond statistics and sociological theories to find the unarticulated, half-understood longings of teenage mothers.
Production Info
Cast: 9 total (7 female, 2 male)Full Length Drama (about 90 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95 Play Description
Three American career women find themselves bound to chairs and interrogated by masked men. One is asked to renounce her country. Another is forced to make a hostage video. And in between, they meet in a suburban coffee shop to compare notes on the experience.
Production Info
Cast: 5 total (3 female, 2 male)Full Length Drama (about 90 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
Play Description
THE GULLIVER TRILOGY presents the adventures of its hero, Lemuel Louis Gulliver, Citizen Candidate of the World, an extraordinary everyman, whose picaresque life begins in 1942 on Chicago's great South Side. Among the issues addressed in LEMUEL are racial segregation, quality of education, assassination of American leaders, abuse of political power, and the needs of the poor and oppressed.
Production Info
Cast: 9 total (4 female, 5 male, multiethnic cast)Full Length Drama (about 110 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95 Play Description
In this lyrical, searing one-act, an American soldier has an unexpected encounter with two Afghan sisters who are ready to embark on a new life. Their fates — and his — become entangled as the lines between their divergent realities become dangerously blurred.
Production Info
Cast: 3 total (2 female, 1 male)Full Length Drama (about 50 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95 Play Description
Combat photojournalist Matthew Milton is charged with flying from Afghanistan to pick up his sister, Lizzie, after a two-month stint in rehab for heroin addiction. Lizzie's wealthy Connecticut lifestyle is no match for her desire to get high, and Matthew’s own addiction to war is masked by his sense of duty to show the public the truth behind our endless wars. With no where else to stay, Sergeant Mac Johnson, just retired, comes home to stay with Matthew, in a building full of fellow photojournalists. The subject of one of Matthew's documentaries, Mac reveals that Matthew's search for the truth, came at the expense of Mac's sense of self, life and privacy. Both drugs and war prove inescapable addictions, in a nation that continues to both feed and hide them.
Production Info
Cast: 6 total (1 female, 5 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95 Play Description
A groundbreaking masterpiece of the modern theatre. The play tells the tale of a poor soldier, a barber in the army, who is overwhelmed by the military and forced to become a human guinea pig for quasi-medical research. Consumed by jealousy over his lover’s infidelity, Woyzeck is driven to despair, to madness, and to murder. Poignant and grotesque, insightful and all-too-human, the play broke every theatrical mold of its time, paving the way for theatre as we know it today.
Production Info
Cast: 16 total (4 female, 12 male, doubling, bit parts, children, extras)Full Length Drama (about 120 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Period Costumes