Oni Faida Lampley: Biography from Answers.com

playwright; actor; essayist

Personal Information

Born Vera Lampley circa 1959, in Oklahoma City, OK
Education: Oberlin College, OH, BA, 1980s.
Memberships: Drama Department, New York Theatre Workshop.

Career

Playwright, 1991-; actor, 1991-; essayist, 1993-.

Life's Work

Oni Faida Lampley permeates the world of theater as both a writer and performer. Working as an actor, Lampley has been in many movies, plays and various television appearances. As an award-winning playwright, Lampley has explored the issues of race, identity construction, and cancer survivorship. Her performances move audiences to the heights and depths of emotion and her words speak to young and old alike.

Not much is known about Lampley's early life. She was born with the name Vera Lampley around 1959 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. She attended an all-white girls' Catholic 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. Lampley's mother was what she has labeled a SBW, Strong Black Woman. In The Dark Kalamazoo she depicts her mother with cigarette in one hand and Scotch glass in the other, sending letters to her full of what Isherwood called in his Daily Variety review "hard-won wisdom, motherly warmth and bitter defensiveness."

Study Abroad Influenced Early Work

Lampley graduated high school and went onto attend Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. At Oberlin, Lampley 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 sought an opportunity to travel abroad through Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

In 1979 Lampley departed on a study abroad trip to Ghana in West Africa. She expected to arrive in Africa and be accepted with open arms. Perceiving a warm welcome in "The Motherland," Lampley was shocked when she arrived and was met with prejudice. Being the only black student in the program of twenty students, she earned the hurtful nickname "Dark Kalamazoo," from the Africans she met--which would become the title of her autobiographical play about the experience. In America, she actively tried to escape the view society had of her as an African. However, upon arriving, she realized that the Africans viewed her as an American, an outsider.

A civil war in Ghana forced her to redirect plans and she traveled to Freetown, Sierra Leone. This affected her personal identity construction and her personal perception of herself as an African-American, and later went to influence her work as a writer. In a later 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 or my own self-absorption." It was this breaking away from self-absorption that allows Lampley to have so much self-reflection in her work as a writer and actress.

After her travels to West Africa, and her graduation from Oberlin, the facts on her life begin to wane. After Oberlin, Lampley went on to attend Julliard's Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights program. There she studied the craft of writing plays but also had the opportunity to experience poetry classes, literature lectures, and theater history classes. As the program only accepts four playwrights each year, this was quite an accomplishment. Her work at Julliard and the pieces that came out of her personal experience garnered her a Lincoln Center DeComte du Nouy Award.

Her first play, Mixed Babies, won her the 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." This piece was based on her college travels to West Africa. The play began with 12 year Vera, learning what it meant to be black in an all-white, girls' Catholic school in Oklahoma City. The play then flashes to 19 year old Vera traveling to Freetown where she won the title "Dark Kalamazoo" from her African hosts. The Dark Kalamazoo garnered Lampley another Helen Hayes nomination in 1999, but did not win her the award.

Fought Cancer by Embracing Theater

In 1996 Lampley was diagnosed with breast cancer in her left breast. Where this tragic diagnosis would paralyze a lesser person, for Lampley it fueled her fire. In 2001 she scripted and performed "Shame the Devil" at a Carnegie Hall benefit, Artists for a Cure. She revived the piece for a 2003 performance in Brooklyn for the second installment of the series "My Soul To Keep," a cancer awareness show. When she took the stage in Brooklyn, she fearlessly showed her bald head, caused by chemo, and made the crowd aware of her age. This act showed Lampley's defiance in the face of adversity and strength of character--characteristics which have driven her career.

Out of her seven year struggle came her show Tough Titty in 2003. In a press release from the BRIC Studio in Brooklyn, Lampley explained her play 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." Useful it was. Tough Titty opened in late October and was well received among critics, audiences and cancer survivors.

However, one should not see Lampley as only a playwright. She is also an accomplished actor. She has made numerous appearances on the television shows Law & Order, Third Watch, Oz, NYPD Blue, and Homicide: Life on the Streets. She has also been seen on the silver screen in minor roles in such movies as Money Train with Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes, Jungle2Jungle with Tim Allen, Bullet with Tupac Shakur, Mickey Rourke, and Adrien Brody, and the Oscar nominated 1996 John Sayles' film Lone Star. In addition to this, she has performed in contemporary and classical material in regional theater and Off-Broadway. She has performed on Broadway in productions of The Ride Down Mt. Morgan and Two Trains Running. She was featured in the 1999 Peter Sellers' operatic staging of Stravinsky's Biblical Pieces premiering in Amsterdam.

With all of this in her life--her writing, her acting, her illness--Lampley continued to flourish and grow as an artist. She was a founding member of the Drama Department, a New York Theater project, and a Usual Suspect at New York Theatre Workshop. She began, in 1993, to write essays and columns for magazines like Mirabella and ELLE. Also, she was a participant in the 1998 Sundance Screenwriters Lab to develop The Dark Kalamazoo into a film. She has recently completed a screenplay based on a work of Robert Coles about African-American migrant farm workers in the 1960s South. She will also appear in the 2004 release Brother To Brother, a film that explores the Harlem Renaissance through the conversations in a New York homeless shelter between an elderly black writer and a gay teen. It is clear that Lampley, while not a household name yet, has already made her impact on the world of entertainment.

Awards

Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding New Play, 1991; Lincoln Center DeComte du Nouy Award.

Works

Selected works

Film

Brother To Brother, 2004.
Jungle2Jungle, 1997.
Money Train, 1995.
The Keeper, 1997.
Lone Star, 1996.

Plays

Mixed Babies, 1990
The Dark Kalamazoo, 1997.
Tough Titty, 2003

Television

Law & Order, NBC, 2003, 2002, 1996, 1993.
Third Watch, NBC, 2001.
Oz, HBO, 1999-2000.
NYPD Blue, ABC, 1993.
Homicide: Life on the Streets, NBC, 1993.
One Life to Live, NBC, 1994, 1997.

Theatrical performances

Mule Bone, Ethel Barrymore Theater, 1991.
The Ride Down Mr. Morgan, Ambassador Theater, 2000.
Two Trains Running, Broadway Production, 1990s.
Biblical Pieces, Amsterdam, 1999.

Other

Numerous essays for a variety of different magazines including Mirabella, and ELLE.

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	Phantom (Law & Order: Criminal Intent episode)
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