Each of Onwueme's published plays so far, it would seem, is a clarion call for social change, the cultivation of new attitudes and new hopes. The society she targets in her works for the stage is both national and international...her quest for social change goes beyond the raising of feminist consciousness in society to include a swipe at the diminishing status of supposedly independent African countries as a result of the powerful gains of neocolonialism. In her plays, there is the persistent vision that, at both the social and personal level, a clear disparity exists in the quality of people's lives, a situation which has been promoted by the oppressive tendencies immanent in our kind of polity. In the end we observe in Onwueme's dramatic corpus an artistic desire to change the status quo through the ridiculing of the obnoxious in our tradition as well as by exposing the political and economic conditions in the society depicted in her drama.
Nwachukwu-Agbada, J.O.J. World Literature Today (Summer 1992): 467.
