The Church is honored to welcome acclaimed storyteller and educator, Mfoniso Udofia. Udofia will read and perform excerpts from several of the plays in her nine-play cycle, The Ufot Family Cycle, which envisions the immigrant experience of a singular Nigerian family from their arrival in America in 1968 through 2051.
To date, Udofia has completed seven plays in the cycle, The Grove, Sojourners, Runboyrun, Her Portmanteau, In Old Age, Adia and Clora Snatch Joy, and Lifted. Each play is fueled by a question that the characters within the story face. Apart from Lifted, all the plays take place on American soil. These plays tell the story of an immigrant "becoming" in a new land and present a truly Nigerian-American folkloric. Since the plays in this cycle vary in style/genre—kitchen-sink play, Greek play, ultra-realism, musical, memory-play—Udofia’s reading will be a rich blending of acting, reading and song. The evening will include insights into Udofia’s creative process, the history involved, and her own background.
She is a storyteller, educator, playwright, and screenwriter, and besides her own deep cultural dive into her and her family's past as a Nigerian immigrant to America, she also worked as a television writer on Thirteen Reasons Why, Little America, Pachinko, A League of Their Own, and Let the Right One In. Productions of her plays have been seen at New York Theatre Workshop, American Conservatory Theater, Playwrights Realm, Magic Theater, National Black Theatre, Strand Theater Company, and Boston Court. She has been the recipient of the 2021 Horton Foote Playwright Award and the Helen Merrill Playwright Award.
“Ultimately, my work seeks to locate a people, a culture and community that has been rendered invisible. So many of the plays we experience on our stages focus on Africans on the continent but... we are here. We are part of the American fabric. You can find us in NYC toiling away at a 9-5 job. Or in rural Massachusetts tending an acre of land and trying to mold the “American Dream” to fit us.”
A wine and cheese reception will be offered to $40 ticket holders, allowing guests the opportunity to converse with Mfoniso Udofia following her performance