Editorials
‘Acting Is Reacting’: What It Takes to Stage a One-Woman Play
As “You Are Special and Other Lies” debuts at the third edition of the Lagos International Theatre Festival, writer and actress Oyeyemi Adeoye and director Prosper Omesieta discuss the art of playing people who aren’t there and the possibilities opening up for Nigerian theatre.
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Oyeyemi Adeoye has been talking to herself for years. Literally. As a teenager, she became fascinated with people’s voices, accents and mannerisms, murmuring to herself, imitating anyone who sounded interesting or unusual. By 2018, she had turned that habit into Gbó, an audio drama podcast in which she performed as many as seven characters, recording their voices separately before editing them into conversations. Now, the writer and actress is taking that experiment onto the stage. Her play, You Are Special and Other Lies, directed by Prosper Omesieta and produced by Starlight Productions, will be performed on 14 and 15 November at La Scala, MUSON Centre in Onikan, as part of the Lagos International Theatre Festival.
Set in an apartment building, the story follows women from different backgrounds and generations, each navigating ambition, shame, love and the truths she would rather avoid. What begins as a hilarious tour through their worlds gradually exposes the tensions and contradictions precariously holding their lives together.
All of these characters inhabit a shared world. Yet there is no supporting cast to respond when Adeoye speaks: You Are Special and Other Lies is a one-woman play.
“A lot of acting is reacting,” Adeoye tells Art Report Africa. “You’re playing with another person. You’re feeding off their energy and how they’re interpreting the situation or circumstance.” In a one-woman play, she explains, the actress must supply that energy herself, imagining how each character would respond to the others as she moves between their roles.
The audience, too, has to exercise its imagination. Theatre already asks us to believe in fictional characters, but a one-woman play takes that further, asking us to see several distinct people in a single performer. “I think what I enjoy even more than acting is making other people believe the things I cannot see, the way I believe them,” she says.
Oyeyemi Adeoye and Prosper Omesieta at rehearsal for You Are Special and Other Lie.Photo: Oroma Anderson. Courtesy of Prosper Omesieta.
For Omesieta, the challenge of bringing multiple characters to life through a single performer is also what makes the production so rewarding. “The actor is the factor,” he says, adding that the priority is keeping each character convincing without slipping into caricature: “You have to strike that careful balance of making sure what you’re doing is true to life.”
The rehearsals have demanded considerable precision. Adeoye must navigate a 52-page script, distinct accents and physical mannerisms, costume changes and props, all while maintaining the rhythm of the performance. At the first rehearsal, she recalls, she could barely make it through a reading of the entire play. Now she can run through it repeatedly, and she credits Omesieta’s patience and his insistence on making each character believable. “He has found a way to take this from just being characters on the page to real people that you can see and say, ‘I know a woman like this,’” she says.
These women were already deeply familiar to Adeoye, their creator, long before rehearsals; Omesieta says the script required relatively few changes because she had already developed their histories and motivations. Their work together focused instead on refining how the characters would come across onstage, while leaving Adeoye room to experiment with each one from performance to performance.
Oyeyemi Adeoye. Courtesy of Oyeyemi Adeoye.
That very willingness to experiment reflects something Omesieta sees happening more widely in Nigerian theatre. He points to performances in restaurants, churches and other unconventional spaces, as well as a growing interest in exploring different dramatic forms and stories rooted in contemporary life. According to him, theatre need not be confined to established formats or conventional stages. “Theatre should be expansive,” he says. “It should be a product of expression.”
A one-woman play is certainly expansive in its ambition. For Adeoye, though, it is also deeply personal. The inward has become outward. The characters who have lived in her imagination for years now have an audience, and although she plays every side of their conversations, she is no longer performing for herself alone. There will be people watching, listening and responding. “It’s not all the time you think of something and then get to do it,” she says.
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