Mfoniso Udofia’s audacious nine-play Ufot Cycle is a bounty of characters, generations, plot twists and genres: Kitchen-sink drama. Autumn-of-life love story. Children’s play. Folk opera.
And still, Udofia, 40, believes that the sprawling series can forge a powerful narrative arc — one that tells of the Nigerian American experience.
“It was a pretty big mandate to myself, that they should be able to stand alone and then, when you see them together, tell an even greater story,” the playwright says in a Zoom interview from New York, where she lives.
The American theater is embracing that story. As its season opener, Round House Theatre is mounting the cycle’s origin tale, “Sojourners,” which the Playwrights Realm premiered off-Broadway in 2016 before a 2017 production at the esteemed New York Theatre Workshop. The play centers on a young Nigerian woman named Abasiama who comes to Texas in the 1970s and copes with homesickness, eccentric new acquaintances, her first Snickers bar, and an unreliable husband who’s entranced by Motown and Thunderbirds.
Three other plays in the cycle have premiered so far around the country. In addition to tackling “Sojourners,” Round House has commissioned another Ufot Cycle installment and developed a third. And in October, the city of Boston will kick off a staging of the entire cycle, with area theaters, universities and other community partners collaborating over two years in an effort that promises the premieres of five of the plays.
All the cross-country buy-in demonstrates that even in a time of existential angst and strained resources, theater is still willing to take up an ambitious challenge — assuming the challenge has the kind of vision, vibrancy and resonance that distinguish the Ufot Cycle.
Udofia “is at the top of her game,” says Loretta Greco, who has spearheaded the Boston initiative as artistic director of the Huntington. “This is a writer that everyone’s going to know about.”
Udofia did not initially intend to write a play cycle. In fact, she did not intend to write plays. Born in Texas and raised in Massachusetts, a child of parents from Nigeria, she majored in political science at Wellesley College and aimed to be a lawyer. Even when a professor took students to see August Wilson’s “Gem of the Ocean” at the Huntington and Udofia met Wilson himself backstage, she didn’t immediately shift gears.
“I was like, ‘Okay, this is wonderful. The play is fantastic. Thank you, Huntington. You moved me deeply. But also: I need to study for the LSAT.’”
She subsequently changed course. After earning a Master of Fine Arts from American Conservatory Theater, she sought work as an actor, but the Great Recession was underway and roles weren’t forthcoming. So she started writing “to process the world,” she says.
A topic that intrigued her was how her own family balanced their love for Nigeria with their appreciation of America. Her parents had come to the United States for educational opportunities, as the couple in “Sojourners” did, and going home was an option.
“What is it to love your home so much, and then be inside of America and yearn a lot for some of the things that America offers, but know that in your bones you want to take what you’ve learned and go home?” Udofia muses. “That’s something that you’ll find in my plays that comes directly from growing up and hearing the love with which my family, and those around who were Nigerian, held Nigeria.”
She wrote one play, then another, about Abasiama’s family. Adiaha Ufot, Abasiama’s queer daughter, demanded attention. Soon Udofia was imagining more of the fictional clan. Only when the playwright was deep into the nine-play series did she recognize the serendipity of having met Wilson years before. His 10-play Century Cycle is a mainstay of the modern theatrical canon. (Multiple theaters in Baltimore are producing the entire Century Cycle.)
“Maybe the universe was trying to tell me something,” she reflects.
Udofia has penned plays that were not part of her cycle, including a rendering of “Othello” in contemporary English. She has also written for television shows including “Lessons in Chemistry” and “13 Reasons Why.”
But the Ufot Cycle (whose last script or two she is still polishing off) has variety of its own. “Runboyrun” touches on Nigeria’s Biafran War of the 1960s. “Adiaha & Clora Snatch Joy,” about love and kismet, is described as a “folk opera” and features songs created with composer Nehemiah Luckett.
The cycle “is historical. It’s archival. It’s forward-thinking. It includes a lot of different lenses. There’s the lens of gender, of class, of sexual orientation, of dreaming, of fighting for freedom. All of those things are included,” says Valerie Curtis-Newton, who directs “Sojourners” for Round House.
With characters who are conscious of both heritage and personal choices, the Ufot plays also deal with what Udofia calls “the push and pull between what is collectivist and what is individual.” It’s a theme that speaks not only to the profundity of her writing, but to how she experiences life.
“I come out of a collectivist culture, and it comes with something,” Udofia says. “It’s beautiful to be part of that and know that you don’t walk singly through the world.”
If you go
Sojourners
Round House Theatre, 4545 East-West Hwy., Bethesda. roundhousetheatre.org.
Dates: Through Oct. 6.
Prices: Starting at $43.
