Plays One:Adaugo,Giddy Festival, the Dawn of Full Moon, Daring Destiny and Withered Thrust

The book, Plays One: Adaugo, Daring Destiny, Giddy Festival, The Dawn of Full Moon and Withered Thrust, is a compilation of plays by an African female Playwright, Osita Catherine Ezenwanebe Ph. D, an Associate Professor of dramatic Arts, University of Lagos Nigeria, a Visiting Professor and Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence, Winston-Salem State University, North Carolina, USA. It is aimed at making the plays available to her foreign audience who learnt of the plays during her scholarly activities as a Senior Fulbright Visiting Professor in United States of America. The plays are African Total Theatre, a functional and multidimensional view of theatre employing mime, songs, dances, chants, rituals, dialogue, etc. to drive home the message. The plays cover her though about the symbiotic relationship between drama and society and capture the social upheavals in Africa and modern world in general. Her perspective is humanist with a special concern for women and youth. Withered Thrust (2007) captures the pervasiveness of corruption; a social epidemic in which the oppressed employ anarchic ways of survival and social crusaders are infested with the same contagion as those they avowedly oppose, making the future look very bleak. Giddy Festival (2009) extends the theme of social rot and moral decay by focusing on the moral bankruptcy of the ruling class and its consequent atrophy of spirit: the politicians are giddy in merriment, full of empty rhetoric, egotistic, morally perverse, ideologically bankrupt and administratively incompetent; the suffering masses adopt anarchic indifference as a shield, and the law is made to look as an ass, resulting in a high disregard of the dignity of the human person. The drum beats, heralding the joyous moment of the power bloc; simultaneously, disjointed bones are fall-offs from the drum beat of their merriment. What a giddy festival! The Dawn of Full Moon (2009) brings a light of hope in the state of woman in many societies of the world where they still labor under the yoke of oppression. The play celebrates the sanctity of womanhood by dramatizing the dark days of a helpless, less privileged teenage girl and her victorious triumph when she blossoms like the dazzling brightness of full moon; strong, forceful and irresistible. It is a play deliberately meant to instill hope and confidence in women and youths. The Dawn of Full Moon also recreates the revolutionary love necessary for sustaining communal ties and gender complementarity. 2. In Adaugo (2011) the playwright deconstructs the suppressive oppression of women embedded in the rigidity of traditional social roles of male breadwinning and female home keeping in modern world and presents it as a major source of crisis in gender relation. By making the female protagonist, Adaugo, excel in both roles at a time her husband could not perform his due to circumstances beyond his control, the playwright celebrates the strength of women and calls for a change in the conception of masculinity in the face of modern experiences. In all, the play upholds the complementarity of the sexes which the playwright sees as imperative for traditional family and communal life. 3. Daring Destiny is a play that advocates Spartan courage and tenacity of purpose as the surest means of achieving a desirable destiny. It dramatizes the fate of the youth in a state where years of misrule has given way to anarchy. Mindless politicians and vicious capitalists cripple the people to penury and turn the youth into expendable cannon folders thereby setting up frightening destiny as their future. The youth are urged to dare such destiny and never give in to despair.