Dael Orlandersmith

Dael Orlandersmith (Donna Brown) is an actress, poet and playwright. She is known for her Obie Award-winning Beauty's Daughter and the 2002 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Drama, Yellowman.

Orlandersmith, born Donna Dael Theresa Orlander Smith Brown in 1959, lived in public housing in New York City's East Harlem. Her mother sent her to a Roman Catholic parochial school, after her father died when she was young. She attended Hunter College but left to attend acting classes at the HB Studio and Actors Studio. She wrote of her work: "There is a theme throughout the work that I write...about childhood and the sins of the father, the sins of the mother, and how people take on the very thing they don’t like about their parents and they become them.”

Her play Beauty's Daughter premiered Off-Broadway at the American Place Theatre from January 25, 1995 to March 26, 1995. Directed by Peter Askin it is a one-woman performance piece. As described by the New York Times reviewer, the show "aims at more than an extended poetry reading. Such plotting as there is follows Diane from her puberty ("I'm a woman now/I am 13 and bleeding in a Harlem living room") to her early 30's." Orlandersmith performs all of the characters by herself "...more of a mimic than an actress. But she is a good mimic, and in switching from female to male, from Puerto Rican to Italian or Irish, from youth to elderly, she only rarely slips from characterization into caricature." Orlandersmith received the 1994-1995 Obie Award Special Citation for this play. Part of her award-winning Beauty's Daughter's program can be heard as a segment of a September 1996 taping of radio show This American Life; in this segment, Orlandersmith performs "When You Talk About Music", in which she portrays a 31-year-old Italian male who meets a black woman at a mutual friend's wedding and finds how much he misses musical expression.

Monster opened at the New York Theatre Workshop on October 31, 1996 and closed on January 19, 1997. A solo show, it was directed by Peter Askin and starred Orlandersmith.

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