Building community through an epic nine-play cycle

The Huntington is launching the Boston Ufot Family Cycle with Sojourners, the first of an extraordinary cycle of nine plays by the visionary Mfoniso Udofia.

Mfoniso Udofia started writing plays 15 years ago because she wanted to see stories onstage that looked and sounded like her family – a Nigerian American family that was brilliant, complex, loving, complicated and beautiful.

She wrote one play that led to another. She realized her two plays needed a third – and soon she had three generations of characters all tapping her on the shoulder, insisting they be included in this braided narrative.

Mfoniso audaciously claimed aloud that she would be writing a nine-play African Diaspora cycle – one where every play stands alone, but where together, we see a panorama unlike anything ever created.

The power of her artistry and the way it can speak to audiences has inspired the Boston theatre community to do something bigger. Thirty five local organizations are banding together to produce all nine plays in tandem with robust educational, humanities and community activation over the next two years.

“Theatre is a place where we come to be altered: to grow through the cathartic power of seeing ourselves reflected back, or through the seismic opportunity to walk in someone else’s shoes for an evening. We’ve been hard at work on this cycle for the last two years, and we are so excited to finally be able to share it with you.” says Huntington Artistic Director Loretta Greco.

“Working on these plays in acclaimed productions all over the country has been one of the great privileges of my career – yet Mfoniso is from Southbridge, Massachusetts and went to Wellesley – so there is a special resonance to her work here. Her work draws on the many overlapping diasporic communities that call our region home, and now her stories will be told here for the first time,” Greco continues. “Two years ago, Mfoniso and I started dreaming about working with other theatres to produce the cycle in Boston, and one conversation at a time, a mighty band of leaders in Boston has come together to make this cycle a reality, and we couldn’t be more grateful.”

The first play in the cycle, Sojourners, is a dramatic anomaly – an immigrant story where there is no fleeing of oppression and instead a desire to return home. Audiences meet the young powerful matriarch, Abasiama, whose story is followed all the way through to play nine.

For her, America is not the ultimate destination, nor is 1978 Texas depicted through rose colored glasses. Here America is a place to gather additional knowledge which will be brought back to elevate and enrich Nigeria, a country she and her young husband love.

This dynamic premise is one of the ways that the play lives in a stunning and complicated gray zone. Like life, Mfoniso doesn’t offer simplistic black or white, good or bad judgments. Rather, she dishes up complicated challenges and choices that require soul searching for her characters and the audiences who witness these stories. When a family is created with this much specificity, the truth speaks to us about our parents, siblings, children and our own unique journeys.