Lampley, Oni Faida

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Oni Faida Lampley

1959-2008

Playwright, actor, essayist

Oni Faida Lampley was an admired actor and writer whose award-winning plays explored issues of race, identity construction, and terminal illness. Her personal experience with disease—Lampley suffered from and eventually died of breast cancer—strongly informed her later plays and essays, in which she openly shared her struggles, fears, and eventual acceptance of herself and her body. She died in April of 2008.

Not much is known about Lampley's early life. She was born Vera Lampley in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, in 1959. She attended a predominantly white, Catholic girls' school, and this experience went on to influence her work and lay the foundations of one of her most acclaimed autobiographical plays, The Dark Kalamazoo (1999). In The Dark Kalamazoo Lampley depicted her mother as a strong black woman, with a cigarette in one hand and a Scotch glass in the other, sending letters to her daughter full of what a reviewer in the Daily Variety called "hard-won wisdom, motherly warmth and bitter defensiveness."

Studied Abroad

Lampley graduated from high school and went on to attend Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, and majored in creative writing. During her second year of college, she sought out opportunities to study abroad, especially the possibility to travel to Africa. Oberlin had no programs that interested Lampley, so she traveled abroad through Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

In 1979 Lampley departed on a study abroad trip to Ghana in West Africa. Expecting a warm welcome in "the Motherland," Lampley was shocked when she arrived and was met with prejudice. Being the only African-American student in the program of twenty people, she was given the hurtful nickname "Dark Kalamazoo" by the Africans she met—which would become the title of her autobiographical play about the experience. In the United States she actively tried to escape the view society had of her as an outsider, but she realized that in Africa she was equally outside the status quo.

A civil war in Ghana forced a change in plans, and Lampley traveled to Freetown, Sierra Leone. Her experiences in Africa affected her perception of herself as an African American and later influenced her work as a playwright. In an interview with writer Zinta Aistars about her play The Dark Kalamazoo, Lampley stated, "Study abroad was a huge milestone for me. It was the biggest step away from my customary life that I have ever made, a step away to see how others saw me—from a distance—and step out of my own self-absorption."

After her travels to West Africa, Lampley returned to Oberlin and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1981. She then attended the Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights program at the Juilliard School in New York City. There, Lampley studied the craft of playwriting, but she also had the opportunity to take classes on poetry and theater history. Her work at Juilliard and the pieces that came out of her personal experience garnered a Lincoln Center Lecomte du Noüy Award.

Her first play, Mixed Babies, won a 1991 Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding New Play. Her next play, The Dark Kalamazoo, received a nomination for a Barrymore Award for Outstanding Leading Actress. Lampley was nominated for another Helen Hayes Award for The Dark Kalamazoo in 1999.

Fought Cancer by Embracing Theater

In 1996 Lampley was diagnosed with breast cancer. Initially stunned by the diagnosis and her body's response to aggressive treatment, Lampley was overcome by shame, feeling that she was somehow to blame for having cancer. In a 2006 essay in Self magazine, Lampley wrote of the exhaustion caused by chemotherapy and radiation: "Perhaps the hardest part of this enforced stillness was my fear that those who loved me would be disappointed if I ceased to be the do-it-all survivor. And then I felt ashamed, once again: There was a ‘right’ way of having cancer, and I was doing it wrong." Nonetheless, Lampley continued working throughout her long battle with the disease, even after it had metastasized to her brain. She became active in breast cancer charities as well. In 2001 she wrote and performed the play Shame the Devil at a Carnegie Hall benefit, Artists for a Cure. She revived the piece for a 2003 performance in New York for the second installment of the series "My Soul to Keep," a cancer awareness show.

Out of her long struggle came her play Tough Titty in 2003. In a press release from the BRIC Studio in New York, Lampley explained the work as "part of digging out of the hole of seven years of breast cancer survivorship." She continued, "As an artist, my way of digesting life's events is to write. I've known for years, as events unfolded after diagnosis, that there is a useful story in this event." In the play, a thirty-seven-year-old mother of an infant receives a diagnosis of breast cancer and goes through the same waves of guilt, shame, and terror that plagued Lampley. The play also examines the effects of terminal illness on marriage and family. Before her death, Lampley learned that her play was set to be performed at San Francisco's Magic Theater in 2009.

Besides her work on the stage, Lampley was also an accomplished film and television actor. She made appearances on the television shows Law & Order, Third Watch, Oz, NYPD Blue, and Homicide: Life on the Streets. She performed roles in such films as Money Train with Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes, Jungle 2 Jungle with Tim Allen, Bullet with Tupac Shakur, Mickey Rourke, and Adrien Brody, and the Oscar-nominated John Sayles film Lone Star. Additionally, she performed in contemporary and classical material in regional theater and off-Broadway. Lampley appeared on Broadway in productions of The Ride down Mt. Morgan and Two Trains Running. In 1999 she was featured in the Peter Sellers operatic staging of Stravinsky's Biblical Pieces in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Lampley was a founding member of the Drama Department, a New York theater project, and was a Usual Suspect at the New York Theatre Workshop. In 1993 she began to write essays and columns for various women's magazines. She was also a participant in the 1998 Sundance Screenwriters Lab to develop The Dark Kalamazoo into a film. Before her death she completed a screenplay based on a work by Robert Coles about African-American migrant farm workers in the 1960s.

At a Glance …

Born Vera Lampley on April 15, 1959, in Oklahoma City, OK; died on April 28, 2008, in New York City, NY; married Tommy Abney; two children: Olu and Ade. Education: Oberlin College, BA, 1981; New York University, graduate degree in acting; Juilliard School, attended playwriting program; National Theater in London, playwriting residency, 2007.

Career: Actor, 1980s-2008; playwright, 1991-2008; essayist, 1993-2008.

Memberships: Drama Department, New York Theatre Workshop.

Awards: Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding New Play, 1991; Lincoln Center Lecomte du Noüy Award.