Temienor Tuedon was born in Warri and raised in Benin City, both in Southern Nigeria. He studied Literature in English at the then University of Ife, Ile-Ife, Nigeria (Obafemi Awolowo University today) from where he graduated in 1978. After a spell as a Literature and English teacher, he embarked on a career in Human Resource Management with the Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria where he was formally trained in that discipline and worked from 1981 – 1999. He obtained a Post Graduate Diploma in Journalism at the Nigerian Institute of Journalism in 1999 and a Masters in Industrial and Labour Relations from the University of Lagos in 2002.

He started writing plays in his undergraduate years and the passion subsists to date despite being engrossed in otherwise tangential vocations as a Business Management Consultant and entrepreneur. At a private level, his plays have continued to attract the attention of thespians in Nigerian universities where many of them have been staged over the years, but they have never really been marketed in the past.

This endeavor is to bring the playwright’s modest contribution to Nigerian literature more into the public domain. All the plays are now available on Amazon.com. To locate a play type the title and name of author in the search bar on Amazon.com. Readers' comments are welcome.

ADAM & EVE
Adam and Eve reincarnate in this play inextricably bound in sin and love.

Adam, a more or less schizophrenic and nagging husband, does not leave his wife, Eve, in peace as he seeks to make meaning of his existence with a mind cluttered by memories and notions of past lives and religious dogmas. His wife, emancipated in the extreme, would rather be a man whilst remaining a woman.

Both of them slug it out in this atmosphere of anomie. They are the reason it. All the great questions are asked: what life is all about - who am I - what am I doing here? While Adam seems to have a premonition of prior loss and present danger, Eve is blissfully oblivious of their state of affairs and just wants to paddle on – a fact that strikes Adam as a painful irony and drives him to despair as he longs for the help and guidance which he senses can best come from a woman’s superior intuitive faculty. Adrift and in conflict and turmoil, they find no footing to reach for answers until events come to their aid and force them through their experiencing to introspect and finally attain to some recognitions and stability.

EKPEN -Tiger in the Swamps
Ekpen - Tiger in the Swamps reaches far back in time to a beginning leading up to the founding of the Okere Community on the back of that of the Warri Kingdom sequel to an epic chase from the shores of the Benin River to a truce in the banks of the Warri River.

A story of historical and epic proportion, of valor, of conflicts between duty, loyalty, and conviction, and of their resolution. From the intrigues and politics in the royal courts of the Oba of Benin over 500 years ago, through an enthralling odyssey involving warfare, romance, and adventure in the swamps and creeks of the Western Niger Delta, to a final recognition of the futility of war, remorse, and then peace and calm, and the founding of the Okere Community on the prayer and conviction that war will never come to it –
Ogun gba j’okere odola!

Of significance in the play is the inner transformation of the indefatigable war general, Ekpen, and his providential use as the instrument for the establishment of Okere as a community of peace. Okere will eventually become the center of the metropolis of Warri under the Warri Kingdom from which the metropolis derives its name. Her inevitable reconciliation with, and absorption by, the Warri Kingdom underscores the irony in conflict and war which is a central theme in this play.

I AM ROYALTY
This play is set in the ancient Warri Kingdom around the 17th Century.

A calculating woman schemes her way into the royal household of the Kingdom. She sacrifices her two children to vaulting ambition and vanity; and her unwary husband, caught in the web of her scheming and conceit, walks into a river to his untimely death leaving his best friend to take final possession of the bed that he had been sharing secretly for many years. In the intense hush that ensues, friend and wife sneak out of town under the cover of night in a race against shame.

The play explores the themes of tradition, the helplessness in authority without power, responsibility and reckless love of self.

TO CAST A FIRST STONE
“Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.” – John 8: 7.

The play is set primarily in a food and drinking shack in the precinct of a university in Nigeria.

The players arrive the shack one after the other, most of them with weighty inner baggage. What starts out as simple and happy banter among friends soon progresses into a series of plays within play through which they explore, critique, and condemn the moral, socio-economic, and political plight of the country, often throwing jibes at themselves but never realizing that the society they so glibly excoriate is a mirror of themselves – until inevitably, inebriated from all the drinking and merrymaking, they begin to point fingers at themselves.

The oppressive entrance of an “embodiment of graft and depravity” eventually forces a dispersal but not before the contents of their individual baggage are spilled for all to see, much to each one’s discomfiture.

THE PASTOR’S CHILD
A pastor’s child wakes up and begins to ask all the forbidden questions. The pastor is distraught, naturally. Is this going to bring about an apocalyptic end to his ministry? And sure enough things grow from bad to worse as the penchant for asking questions becomes uncontrollably infectious. Meanwhile, his wife and a trusted family friend are in their own ways more than casually interested in the pastor’s pet project – The Tintinnabulation Ministry. The Pastor’s Child is a soul-stirring play. One finds oneself rethinking at a deeper level much of what one has taken for granted and accepted as established pillars of faith. The penchant for asking questions may just as well infect any reader of this play. Could this be the intention of the playwright?

Temienor Tuedon has published a handful of plays, most of them satirical commentaries on societal ills and values. Coming on the heels of his last play, Adam & Eve, this latest play, though still heavily satirical and with the usual dose of humor, suggests a turning inward on the part of the playwright. In this play, he seems to be urging his readers to re-evaluate some of those basic precepts and tenets that most of us willy-nilly anchor our lives on. Perhaps, like Pastor Tintinabule in the play, we may well come through the crucible of experiencing to humbling but profound recognitions.

BUSINESS ADVENTURES OF MR. TORTOISE – The Defecant Delight Company
A Management folklore and drama.

Once upon a time, there lived a tortoise in a forest close to the human community. Mr. Tortoise was a proud and confident businessman. He believed he was the smartest of all creatures on earth. He was so smart he hired dogs to work for him and sell his products to themselves. His friend and confidant was Mr. Squirrel. Mr. Squirrel was also smart, and Mr. Tortoise believed he always drank from a pot of wisdom hidden up in the trees.

Together, they ran a company called THE DEFECANT DELIGHT COMPANY.

This is their story.