In an exclusive interview, the director of Mfoniso Udofia’s new Lincoln Center play explains how a bare stage, a make-believe blanket and a looping track can hold an entire life.
In Tamilla Woodard’s staging of creation stories and all the important importants, a woman runs around a track no bigger than a small room. She has places to be, plans to keep, a life to arrange. Yet each circuit returns her to where she began.
The track occupies the Claire Tow Theater at Lincoln Center, where Woodard has directed Mfoniso Udofia’s new play about a woman navigating fertility treatment, memories of childhood and the possibility that her carefully ordered future might not come to pass. The action takes place over one day. The past, however, refuses to observe such a tidy limit.
Woodard had wanted the stage to turn. A revolving platform would have suited a play that she and Udofia had imagined, from its earliest drafts, as a loop. The Tow could not accommodate a turntable, so the director and scenic designer Jason Ardizzone-West devised a different solution: a little two-lane circuit for the woman to travel.
“Our set is like a tiny two lane race track that thegrownwoman races around endlessly, going places but perhaps getting no where, fast,” Woodard told New York Hours in an interview.
It is a joke with an uncomfortable edge. The grown woman, as Udofia names her, keeps herself occupied, moving forward even when forward is merely another lap. The stage gives a literal form to an old distinction between activity and change.
There is remarkably little furniture to get in her way. Woodard dispensed with the domestic equipment that a more conventional production might use to establish a home. “There is no couch, no bed, no desk. There are no doors. There is just one long bench,” she said.
The bench becomes whatever the actors need it to be. Most of the smaller objects have disappeared altogether. A medicine needle, a blanket, a dinner feast: the performers handle each without anything in their hands. Woodard argued that the missing props demand a livelier participation from the audience. The needle imagined by a spectator may be more sharply felt than one acquired from a prop cupboard.
A few things remain conspicuously material. Among them are a giant cracked teacup, a box of brightly colored videotapes, a trombone and notebooks that appear in radically different sizes. Woodard calls attention not to how accurately the objects reproduce everyday possessions, but to the histories they have acquired. The teacup matters because somebody remembers it. The notebooks matter because somebody has filled them, or wants to.
“These things take the weight of the most important importants of the title,” she said.
The decision recalls a longstanding bargain between theater and its audience. Onstage, a piece of wood can be a room, a road or a vessel, provided that the actors believe in it persuasively enough. Woodard takes that bargain further. By removing a real blanket, she can give the childhood blanket a personality.
Donnetta Lavinia Grays plays Mr. Cornell, a magical pony blanket, in what Woodard delightedly called “one of the best entrances ever on stage!” Grays is also first heard as the voice of Alexa, and performs the Raffia, with movement choreographed by Adesola Asakalumi. Her appearances bring an Amazon voice assistant, a childhood comfort and a figure from another imaginative register into the same theatrical space.
The other two performers have more continuous identities. Abigail Onwulani plays thegrownwoman, while Savannah Commodore appears as the Little Girl. Woodard said both characters move through the consequences of the day rather than simply changing costumes or identities. The girl remains present, inconveniently so, beside the adult she will become.
Even when the woman tries to dismiss her younger self, the stage defeats her. The loop sends the child back again. What a person wishes to leave behind is not always willing to go.
The director also denies her protagonist much silence. Sound is present, Woodard said, in almost every moment of the production. The woman needs music or noise to mark the hours and assure herself that things are proceeding. Stillness is harder to bear than another lap.
That preoccupation gives the appearance of Alexa an extra sting. The familiar digital voice belongs to a world in which a command produces an immediate answer. The woman at the center of Udofia’s play confronts something no assistant can schedule or resolve on demand.
Projections by Kate Freer spread across the set, including nine large pieces of paper that swoop upward in the design. Woodard described Freer and Ardizzone-West working together to make images and scenery answer to the same circular rhythm. The stage is sparse, but it is never inert.
The theatrical machinery eventually changes its meaning. The track that confined the woman does not vanish. Instead, Woodard described a movement away from frantic repetition and toward an encounter with the person at the center of it. The girl, too, ceases to be merely an interruption.
Woodard chairs the acting program at Yale’s David Geffen School of Drama and has directed productions including Sweat, Top Girls and The Winter’s Tale. Here she has chosen not to illustrate Udofia’s shifting world with realistic rooms or reassuringly solid objects. She asks the actors to supply what the scenery will not.
A production about fertility, disappointment and the stories people tell themselves could easily become overwhelmed by its symbols. Woodard’s most effective idea is also her simplest: keep the woman moving until the audience can see the cost of movement itself. As the director described the play’s turn, thegrownwoman begins “moving more towards her center, closer to herself, more revealed, more open, and towards great possibility.”
creation stories and all the important importants is at Lincoln Center Theater’s Claire Tow Theater through November 1, 2026.
