Ever since the Greek tragedies about the royal houses of Atreus and Thebes were first performed, family stories have remained a fundamental component of dramatic literature.
The Ufot Cycle is Mfoniso Udofia’s ambitious series of nine contemporary dramas regarding a family of Nigerian immigrants and their American-born children. Two of the plays, runboyrun and In Old Age, opened on Monday at New York Theatre Workshop, which presented two other Ufot Cycle dramas in 2017.
For anyone who did not see those previous works—like me—an insert in the NYTW program provides a not entirely helpful Ufot ancestral tree plus brief summaries of the plays in the cycle, three of which have yet to be composed.
The third play in Udofia’s series is runboyrun, set in a ramshackle house in a Massachusetts town in 2012. The story observes the troubled marriage of Disciple and Abasiama Ufot, a disaffected Nigerian couple in their fifties. Disciple, an historian and an instructor of African-American history at a community college, is a volatile man soon revealed to be haunted by his boyhood spent amid the genocidal Biafran War in Nigeria during the late 1960s.
The figures of Disciple’s younger self, his protective teen sister, his hideously scarred elder brother, and his fiercely vigilant mother frequently appear onstage in these memories that Abasiama does not share. The family is shown coping with life in a refugee camp that later is besieged by murderous invaders.
For the greater part of the 90-minute drama, a long-suffering Abasiama remains unaware of Disciple’s experiences. She witnesses only her husband’s paranoid, erratic behavior. A demand for divorce leads to the story’s eventual crisis. A climactic sequence depicts the Nigerian family running from immediate danger—literally so, around the perimeters of the theater’s auditorium—even as the adult Disciple chases after the ghosts from his past.
Loretta Greco, the director, capably melds the actions of the tragic past and unhappy present upon designer Andrew Boyce’s skeletal wooden representation of the house. Designer Oona Curley’s lighting tints the scenes set in Nigeria in warm pinks and tangerines.
A tiny figure with an expressive face, Patrice Johnson Chevannes roots the far-flung story as Abasiama, who apparently shapes up as the indomitable matriarch of the Ufot family cycle. Sometimes nearly frenzied in his urgent depiction of the troubled Disciple, Chiké Johnson is not entirely comprehensible in his speech. Similarly, the company’s Nigerian accents partly obscures some of the playwright’s intermittently poetic dialogue. Since all of the characters are Nigerian, one wonders whether accents might be less heavily applied by the actors.
Essentially a sorrowful drama that concludes on a mildly upbeat note, runboyrun is far more substantial than In Old Age, which is situated some years in the future (and several plays later) in Udofia’s series. Again set in the Massachusetts house, by now in decrepit condition, In Old Age finds Abasiama a widow and a recluse. Into the woman’s desolate existence unexpectedly arrives Azell Abernathy, a cheerful handyman who gives Abasiama some bright new flooring and then a new lease on life.
A two-character play, In Old Age presents a predictable, well-worn, romantic tale that is given much-needed charm by Ron Canada’s exuberant presence as Abernathy and Chevannnes’ darling portrayal of the frail yet feisty Abasiama. One wishes that Awoye Timpo, the director of this second work on the bill, had talked the playwright into editing the 90-minute piece drastically, but at least she provides a neat staging of these overlong doings.
Like runboyrun, the story happens to be haunted, only in this case by Disciple’s unseen spirit, whose displeasure is expressed in nearly incessant barrages of thumpings and knockings from beneath the floorboards. David Van Tieghem, the ever-masterful sound designer, aptly provides the variable noises that punctuate this later-life romance.
runboyrun & In Old Age opened September 23, 2019, at New York Theatre Workshop and runs through October 13. Tickets and information: nytw.org
