Femi Euba

Femi Euba (born April 1941, Lagos, Nigeria) is a Nigerian actor and dramatist. Among the topics of his plays is Yoruba culture.

Education and career

Euba could be called a man of many parts as a theatre practitioner (acting, playwriting, directing). A Lagosian by birth, he studied acting at the Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama, earning a diploma in 1965, after which he appeared in many shows on the London Stage, including the Royal Court Theatre production of Wole Soyinka's The Lion and the Jewel, and Shakespeare's Macbeth, with the late Sir Alec Guinness as Macbeth and the late Simone Signoret as Lady Macbeth.

Euba left London in 1970 to study Playwriting and Dramatic Literature at the Yale School of Drama, where his received an MFA in 1973. In 1980-82 he went back to Yale to study, receiving an MA in Afro-American Studies. He then returned to Nigeria, where he worked for some years, and earned a PhD in Literature-in-English at the University of Ife, Nigeria (now Obafemi Awolowo University), in 1986.

Over the years, Euba has taught at different colleges and universities, in Nigeria and the US, including the College of William & Mary in Virginia. Currently the Louise and Kenneth Kinney Professor at the Louisiana State University, he has continued to teach playwriting, and dramatic literature, mostly concentrating on the drama and theatre of Africa and of the African diaspora. He is also a consultant in Black Theatre. Among the many plays he has directed variously are Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman and The Trials of Brother Jero; Edouard Glissant's Monsieur Toussaint; August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone; Shakespeare's The Tempest; Molière's The Learned Ladies; and Euripides' Alcestis. His favorite saying for his students, whether in acting, playwriting or directing is: "You need to get down to brass tacks."

Works

• "Akibu: a play for television in two parts" in Five African Plays; ed. Cosmo Pieterse. London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1972.
• A Riddle of the Palms and Crocodiles (plays), Negro Ensemble Company, 1973.
• Archetypes, Imprecators and Victims of Fate: Origins and Developments of Satire in Black Drama, Greenwood Press, 1989.
• The Gulf, Longman, 1991.
• "The Eye of Gabriel" (play), in Black Drama, Alexander Street Press, 2002.
• "Dionysus of the Holocaust" (play), in Black Drama, Alexander Street Press, 2002.
• Poetics of the Creative Process: An Organic Practicum to Playwriting, University Press of America, 2005.
• Camwood at Crossroads (novel), Xlibris, 2007.

References

• Contemporary Authors Online, Thomson Gale, 2005.

External Links

• College of Music & Dramatic Arts, Louisiana State University