About the Play:

Girl Gone has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Female Monologues.

Girl Gone is a full-length suspense drama by Jacquelyn Reingold. When a stripper is brutally and senselessly murdered in Girl Gone, her best friend embarks on a dangerous and obsessive quest to find the monster who killed her. Her self-destructive journey educates her to the darkness and menace of life.

Girl Gone is a fast-paced whodunit set amid the seedy world of strip clubs, with the story focused on a young stripper named Tish. When her stripper pal Jean is brutally murdered, Tish refuses to let the murder of her mentor become just another statistic. She begins a perilous quest to find out who killed her tough but vulnerable best friend and why. As she searches for the killer, she begins to relive the victim's troubled life and to confront her own deteriorating identity. The action moves rapidly from the past to the present, in and out of Tish's mind from a strip club, to a cool male hustler's apartment, to the middle of the street, as she tries to put together a fractured world where the pieces no longer fit. Tish finds her suspect playing the saxophone in a jazz nightspot and risks her own life by coercing him into a reenactment of the crime. In a shocking turnaround, Tish finds she's perilously close to replicating her friend's fate..

Girl Gone premiered in 1999 at the Manhattan Class Company (MCC) off-Broadway in New York City and was a Finalist for the prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn Prize honouring the best English-language women writers worldwide. The play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and has been mounted by colleges and regional theatres.

Cast: 4 female, 4 male

What people say:

"The mysteries of life, death and survival in the city, of friendships among women and relationships between the sexes are explored…in Jacquelyn Reingold's Girl Gone … the playwright display[s] admirable talent and generate[s] plenty of interest, tension and ideas." — New York Times

"Reingold has in Tish a believable adventuress, gamely living at the edge and determinedly shedding the things that protect her – family, girlfriends, lover – one layer at a time. And as she does, an authentic, and authentically theatrical, voice emerges." — Variety

"[A] taut and sufficiently tawdry suspense drama…." — Daily Record

"taut psychosexual thriller delves into themes of sexual exploitation and fear of intimacy." — LA Weekly

About the Playwright:

Jacquelyn Reingold is an American playwright and film and TV writer. Her plays have been produced Off-Broadway in New York, Los Angeles, across the US, in London, Belgrade, Berlin, and Hong Kong. She has taught writing at New York University, Columbia University, Ohio University, Fordham University, Goddard College, the Stonybrook-Southampton Writers Conference, and Oberlin College.