Exclusive interview · Theater
The first time Mfoniso Udofia imagined Abasiama Ufot as an old woman, she imagined someone who had hardened. This was not a casual decision. Udofia had already spent years constructing the life of her Nigerian American matriarch, and she could trace the injuries that might have brought her there. The writing, she thought, was beautiful. The destination was plausible. But as the years went on, the playwright began to mistrust it.
“I had written a woman who’d calcified,” Udofia told me in a conversation this week. Returning to the plays, she found herself asking a question that was as much about her own imagination as about Abasiama: “Can the pain in the beginning morph into something else?”
New York theatergoers have just encountered another side of Udofia’s imagination. Her creation stories and all the important importants, which closed at Lincoln Center Theater’s Claire Tow Theater on November 1, follows a Black woman reckoning with motherhood, ancestry, and the competing claims of the selves she might become. It is an intimate, mythic counterpoint to the vast family history now nearing its conclusion in Boston. The distance between the plays is one of scale, rather than subject: both ask what women owe to others and what may remain for themselves.
New York also helped establish the Ufot family’s theatrical life. In 2017, New York Theatre Workshop presented Sojourners alongside Her Portmanteau, bringing an early and a later chapter of the family story to the same stage. Udofia developed work at New Dramatists and has long been part of the city’s playwright community. What Boston audiences are now seeing in full has a history on New York stages.
That question has come to occupy an immense piece of theatrical real estate. For seventeen years Udofia has been writing the nine plays of the Ufot Family Cycle, which follows a Nigerian American family across three generations and nearly a century. Since 2024, a coalition of Boston theaters and arts organizations has undertaken the unusual business of presenting the entire cycle. Its final installment, Adia & Clora Snatch Joy, opens at the Huntington Theatre on November 24. It is a folk opera about two women who have spent much of their lives looking after other people and who begin to consider, belatedly, what they might want for themselves.
“When I first started, my pen was bloodier but not sharper,” she said. “And now my pen is sharper, and I am not as interested in drawing blood.”
When she began the cycle, she was roughly twenty-five, an age at which she remembers believing herself fully grown. She had the impulse to make a large work, but not yet all the instruments for building one. Seventeen years later she has been able to return to early sketches and discover meanings that were, she said, only faintly audible to her younger self. “The writing is really attached to the vessel that’s conjuring it,” she observed.
Abasiama, the cycle’s center of gravity, began in Sojourners, a story of marriage, migration, and self-invention in the late nineteen-seventies. She is no abstraction of the immigrant experience; she is someone with a temperament, a family, a store of grievances, and plans that do not always survive contact with the people she loves. To extend her life through other plays was to discover that even the person whom the writer knows best can remain capable of surprise.
The final work transfers that possibility to the next generation. Adiaha Ufot arrives in South Carolina looking for answers about her late mother and encounters Clora Abernathy, whose own life has been organized around duty. Both women have been good daughters. Their meeting presents a more awkward, and potentially liberating, proposition: they might also be entitled to pleasure.
For Udofia, the question is particularly charged for Black women who are expected to keep families and communities intact. Abasiama was the family’s “dream holder and the glue,” she said, and her eldest daughter inherited that reflex. “Who’s loving the provider?” Udofia wondered.
We talked about the point at which caring for others becomes a way of disappearing from one’s own life. Udofia was wary of the terms of the question. In a collectivist culture, she said, the individual is not necessarily the first unit by which a good life is measured. The community precedes the self; to demand happiness apart from it can feel like a betrayal. This is not a dilemma confined to the African diaspora, although it gives the Ufot stories a particular texture.
“I wanted to have two women who come from the we discover their I,” she said, “and go, that is okay.” Finding love that belongs to you, she added, need not mean stepping outside the community.
The ending has also demanded a change in theatrical language. Adia & Clora Snatch Joy began as a straight play. It grew into a folk opera, with a book, libretto, and lyrics by Udofia, music by Michael Ellis Ingram, and direction by Awoye Timpo. The music is written for unaccompanied voices; its sources reach toward church songs, praise traditions, and the ring shouts of the Low Country.
Udofia had already brought ancestors into The Grove, where spirits tried to break through the consciousness of a living character. In the new work, mere speech seemed insufficient. She began by imagining mouth percussion, humming, buzzing, and chirping. Those sounds developed into chords. The chords suggested music that carried the histories of the two women: Adiaha’s Nigerian inheritance and Clora’s Geechee Gullah roots.
The shift had a personal logic. Before she was a playwright, Udofia sang opera and played trombone. “I am a musician,” she told me, and said that she hears meter even when she is writing dialogue. The opera was less a departure than a return to a language she had known before she began putting words on a stage.
Different venues shared resources and, in time, audiences. Patrons followed the Ufot family across theaters. Udofia found herself recognized, occasionally, near the Huntington. “Playwrights are not rock stars,” she said. They do not ordinarily enter a drugstore to find strangers talking about their work. Yet in Boston she has had something resembling a local constituency.
What impressed her most was the public’s willingness to become part of an unfinished process. Lifted, one of the more difficult plays to write, was presented in workshops that changed from one performance to the next. Some spectators attended three or four versions. They came prepared not merely to watch but to argue from memory, recalling details from other installments and suggesting what a character ought to do next.
Udofia had just completed the first week of rehearsals for the finale when we spoke. At a read-through she was startled by sadness. She had spent so long with the work, and had written it in such a scrambled order, that she assumed she had already made her peace with finishing. Then she realized that this would be her last first reading with the Ufot family in Boston. “I guess I am in the act of saying goodbye,” she said. “I thought I would be a little further along than I seem I actually am.”
Near the end of our conversation, I asked whether the experience had changed the way she regarded her own life. Her answer did not concern career, achievement, or the sheer stamina required to write nine plays. She said that the work had enlarged her capacity for empathy. Again and again she had to inhabit the lives of people whom, on first acquaintance, she might have judged. Their decisions became harder to dismiss once she understood what had made them.
“My best writing does not come from a place of judgment,” she said. “It comes from a place of curiosity.” Curiosity, in turn, had made her less certain about what one human being may demand of another. “I became more human in the writing of the plays.”
Perhaps that is the most consequential revision in the Ufot family. At twenty-five, Udofia could imagine what would happen to a woman who carried too much pain. At the end of seventeen years, she is still interested in the pain, but no longer content to let it have the last word. The matriarch’s daughter is about to stand on a stage and ask for a life of her own. The playwright, watching from the other side of the footlights, has learned to let her.
Adia & Clora Snatch Joy runs November 24–December 13 at the Huntington Theatre in Boston. This article is based on an original November 2 interview with Mfoniso Udofia.
