Oni Faida Lampley
c/o Beth Blickers
Abrams Artists Agency
275 Seventh Avenue, 26th Floor
New York, NY 10001
(646) 486-4600
(646) 486-0100 fax
Agent Email:
beth.blickers@abramsart.com
Email:
newdramatists@newdramatists.org
Oni Faida was raised in
Oklahoma City. A lot of her work grows out of the comedy and the conflicts
of growing up Black in the Midwest in the 70’s. She's especially interested
in taking a machete to the cliché of the "Strong Black Woman" (SBW), to
expose the physical and spiritual exhaustion, the self-denigration, and
authentic triumph underneath. Through it all, Lampley celebrates the spirit,
language, and courage of people who are fighting for love, and survival.
She has received two Helen Hayes nominations, winning the first. She won
entrance into the 1998 Sundance Screenwriters Lab, and is currently working
on a commission from South Coast Repertory theatre. As a member of
Juilliard’s Playwrighting Program, Lampley received The Lincoln Center
LeComte du Nouy Award. Other grants and commissions include the Smithsonian
Institute, a William and Eva Fox Foundation grant, the DC Commission on the
Arts and Humanities, a commission from Alabama Shakespeare Festival, and a
NYSCA grant via Brooklyn Information and Culture (BRIC). She is a Resident
Playwright with Mud/Bone theatre company, has written for popular magazines,
and became a member of New Dramatists in 2004. She lives in Brooklyn, NY
with her husband and sons.
TOUGH TITTY
Full length
2M, 5F
Flexible set
In Tough Titty, Angela, a thirty-seven-year-old breast-feeding mother of
two, receives a startling breast cancer diagnosis. The play explores the
toll taken on her family, especially on her marriage, through
recurrences and the rigors of treatment. What happens when you don’t die
and you don't get better? With poignant humor, the play depicts her
fight out of the shame of illness in a society stuck in denial of death
and aging. As cancer pushes her outside of her community for help, a
multi-cultural cast of characters emerges on her journey, including a
Chinese-Jewish oncologist who excites in her a thirst for Yiddish.
Angela learns to relinquish her ideas of how life is “supposed” to go,
ask for what she needs, and accept the love and limitations of friends,
family, medicine, and herself. Ultimately, Tough Titty celebrates
constructive engagement with the incurable uncertainty of life.
Premiered at Williamstown Theatre
Festival (summer 2005). Originally commissioned by South Coast Rep.
Readings at The Actors Center, Mudbone Theatre Company at Hunts Point,
BRIC Studio (2003, workshop/reading), South Coast Rep Theatre Pacific
Playwrights Festival (2005, workshop production).
MIXED BABIES
One-act Comedy
5-6W
Flexible Set
This play is set in Oklahoma City in the mid 1970’s. Reva, a Black girl
of sixteen, and four of her friends are having a slumber party. The
girls are in the process of “discovering” who they are. Reva proposes
they conduct their own “Rite of Passage” based upon bits of information
she’s gleaned from a book. Her friends, Andee, who's happy to be a
middle-class girl; Thommie, who chooses from week to week what race she
wants to be; Dena, who's exploring sex as a means of self-definition;
and Shalanda, who is shy, a compulsive eater who looks up to the others,
regard Reva's plan skeptically. There’s a big blow-up, and ultimately,
only two girls will participate. And though the ritual ultimately
“flops,” Reva gains something from it, and as the morning dawns, she may
be beginning her life as a woman.
Originally workshopped at the
Source Theatre in Washington, DC in 1990, directed by Jennifer Nelson.
Produced by Washington Stage Guild, winning the 1991 Helen Hayes Award,
directed by Derek Anson Jones. New York premiere: Manhattan Class
Company (1992), Jennifer Nelson, director. Published by Dramatists Play
Services (1992). Has been performed at various theatre festivals, high
schools, and colleges.
THE DARK KALAMAZOO
Comedy-Drama/90 mins. no intermission
1W, 1 musician suggested
Flexible Set
Our storyteller, a woman in her late thirties, comes to terms with the
girl she was at 19, when she traveled from her Midwestern home to “The
Motherland,” West Africa. Eager to finally be in the majority, and to be
someplace where she’s considered beautiful, she unexpectedly winds up
the only black student in a group of white kids from Kalamazoo College.
Africa isn’t what Vera expects, and she learns, “When they heard a
Black-American woman was coming, they expected Diana Ross, but they got
me. One of the only women on this campus with nappy hair!” She falls in
love, experiences acceptance, rejection, passion, heartbreak, and is
ultimately slapped out of her self-absorption. Along the way, our
storyteller unearths some hard truths about her relationship with her
mother, and her goals as a woman. A funny, poignant, and unusual
coming-of-age story, with strong political undertones exploring the
colonization of African and African-American minds, this play is a
delightful dance from Oklahoma City, to Sierra Leone and back to the
true wilds of JFK airport. This can be performed as a one-woman piece or
with the contribution of an onstage musician whose music works as a
character in the play.
Workshops and readings at CAP 21
(1995) and Playwrights Horizons (1998); Lynn M. Thomson, director. World
Premiere at Woolly Mammoth, Thomson as director and dramaturg; Kevin
Campbell, composer and musician. Opened at Freedom Repertory Theatre in
Philadelphia (2001), Tom Prewitt, director, Campbell as sound designer,
composer, and live musician. New York debut at Drama Department (2002),
Tom Prewitt, director; sound design, original music composition, and
live performance by Kevin Campbell; set, Allen Moyer; costume design,
Gregory A. Gale. The Dark Kalamazoo has been published by TCG in the
anthology, The Fire This Time (2004).