The life of Bess Myerson, the only Jewish woman to have won the Miss America title, in 1945, was two sides of a coin: the face was that of a very beautiful, proud, and successful woman, but her private life involved difficult relationships, most notably with her daughter, Barbara (Barra) Grant. Their mother-daughter interaction, and Bess’s attempts to create her daughter in her own image, are the center of Grant’s solo play/memoir Miss America’s Ugly Daughter. The audience never sees the subject, but she is sometimes heard offstage, her voice (by Anna Holbrook) always booming and intruding in her child’s life.