ABSTRACT
Sefi Atta is best known in Nigeria as a female novelist and writer of short stories. She is famous for writing Everything Good Will Come (novel), Swallow (novel), A Bit of Difference (novel) and News from Home (short stories). Although trained as an accountant, Atta has also written plays, most of them produced and published in Lagos and abroad. Her plays include The Engagement, The Naming Ceremony, Last Stand, An Ordinary Man, Renovation, Absent Times, Lengths to Which We Go, The Death Road, The State versus Merryweather and The Sentence. The art of the novelist is different from that of the dramatist, even when they both are exposed to the same materials. Atta, in an interview, affirms that she prefers playwriting to any other genre of literature. Against this backdrop, this chapter sets out to examine Atta's dramaturgy and how far she has succeeded, given the fact that she is first and foremost a successful novelist who has recently turned to the art of playwriting and in the light of the authorial claim that she functions better in the art of drama. The plays examined in this chapter are Renovation and The Engagement. The art of the dramatist is conceptualised against that of the novelist using Atta's attempts as an illustration. I also isolate elements of prose, if any, in her drama and how the techniques used in the plays figure out on stage and communicate the message of the drama. The chapter concludes that Atta's world in the novel is not different from that of the plays; it is the world of women and her focus in both genres is varied and interesting. Her example adds a new dimension to female dramatic constructions in Nigeria.
