'The Missing Face' is Beholding...In this meticulously paced play, Ida...a true optimist about love, family and her culture, takes a great leap in rearing her son, Amaechi...until she decides to leave the masculine formation of her young man-child to his father, who is domiciled in Africa...'The Missing Face' offers a rich illustration of music...ritual and tradition that is noble in looking back and seizing the moment.- ?Laura Andrews, Amsterdam News, New York The Missing Face has many interesting characters and proactive ideas...The conflict between Ida and Odozi is refreshing and funny; it's fascinating to see and hear an African-American lecture an African about... his] own culture, and then to hear his bemused response...Odozi's colorful language, full of jokes and elaborate metaphors, is intriguing...There are many fine moments in the play concerning African culture and the relationship that modern African-Americans and Africans have with it.?- Nrooke Pierce, Theater Mania, New York Show In all her work, Onwueme has shown daring in her exploration of ideas, even when they lead to subjects and themes which may seem taboo. She has a way of using images to express very crucial ideas. For example, in Legacies or The Missing Face] where lkenga is split into two halves-she explores important pan-African themes and sums up the historical tragedy of the first major division of Africa into continental and diasporan entities. Wholeness will come when the two halves come together.- ?Ngugi wa Thiong'o, foreword to Onwueme's Tell It To Women

An explosive political drama projecting an African people's revolutionary struggle to confront government forces and foreign oil corporations that have ravaged their land and strangled the voices of their mothers and daughters.

Renowned playwright Osonye Tess Onwueme's powerful new drama illuminates the effect of national and global oil politics on the lives of impoverished rural Nigerians. What Mama Said is set in the metaphorical state of Sufferland, whose people are starving and routinely exploited and terrorized by corrupt government officials and multinational oil companies--that is, until a voice erupts and moves the wounded women and youths to rise up and demand justice.

Onwueme's powerful characters and vibrant, emotionally charged scenes bring to life a turbulent movement for change and challenge to tradition. Aggrieved youths and militant women--whose husbands and sons work in the refineries or have been slaughtered in the violent struggle--take center stage to drum their pain in this drama about revolution. Determined to finally confront the multinational forces that have long humiliated them, Sufferland villagers burn down pipelines and kidnap an oil company director. Tensions peak, and activist leaders are put on trial before a global jury that can no longer ignore the situation. What Mama Said is a moving portrayal of the battle for human rights, dignity, compensation, and the right of a nation's people to control the resources of their own land.

Tell It To Women gives traditional rural women a voice: the women from Idu break from their assumed position of silence and powerlessness to confront the urban women who believe their western education gives them the authority to speak for all women.

Using the magic of movement, dance, and drama, and the devices of humor and metaphor, Osonye Tess Onwueme has created a post-feminist epic drama that transcends current feminist theories. An ideologically and politically powerful work, Tell It to Women offers a critical discourse on the western feminist movement from an African traditional perspective, focusing attention on the often silenced issues of intra-gender politics and class inequities.

Recreates and globalizes an Igbo folktale about the animals' struggle for survival and triumph in a world where the weak and poor tortoises must strive to alter their powerless condition by confronting the oppressive forces of the rich and powerful elephants, who constantly push them to the edge of power and insecurity.

Shakara dance-hall queen is a gripping drama on the struggle for identity, power and control, engulfing mothers and daughters in a modern city that is sharply split between the rich and the poor. How do these mothers and daughters cope in a world, where their very survival is constantly challenged by the unyielding social and economic forces? Stay tuned for Shakara Internationally renowned for her award-winning plays, and novels, Dr. Tess Onwueme is Africa's best known female dramatist, whose writing and speaking often poke into taboo and controversial subjects, revealing the untold hidden stories of young women and the poor, who remain caught in various crossfires with; family, tradition, race, class, gender, culture and politics. But then in the growing stampede for material wealth and power in both Africa and the global community today, their striving for voice, place and identity still remain unheard, thus provoking Dr. Tess Onwueme who commits herself as a writer with an active conscience to constantly stage-a-hearing for them through her inspiring provocative writing and speaking. That the BBC recently adapted and produced Onwueme's 2001 award-winning play, Shakara: Dance-Hall Queen as a major feature of their BBC World Drama Service for the Fall of 2004, is only one of such recent testimonies, marking the enriching value of Dr. Onwueme s creative work as a steady staple for the international public, as well as schools, colleges, and universities in international contexts, where her creative writing continue to impact and transform the academic curricular as scholars and teachers continuously adapt as primary teaching texts and tools for teaching, scholarship, theses, and dissertations.

The play is set in the metaphoric state of Hungaria. Nagging questions and concerns fuel the struggles of rising militant and radicalised women and youths in a dramatised revolutionary struggle for change and challenge to tradition. The relegated women take centre-stage to air their grievances and project their cause to the international community in an effort to destabilise the multinational forces and class interests which have oppressed them for so long. They ask, how long can a people whose land produces the richest oil and gas resources, which control local, national and foreign interests, continue to exist in silence, abject poverty and hunger, and sugger acute fuel, water and electricity shortages? The author has won the Association of Nigerian Authors' Drama Prize three times for Shakara: Dance-Hall Queen, Tell It To Women, and The Desert Encroaches.