Mfoniso Udofia Kicks Off 'Writers Voices,' a New Series at The Church in Sag Harbor

Mfoniso Udofia no longer answers to her westernized nickname, a two-syllable Americanized moniker that never quite fit.

Even so, when she decided to shed it, she was nervous.

“Weighing going into the artistic field with my name, there was some fear there,” she said. “And then I was just, like, whatever — everybody learns every other name. We can say ‘Dostoevsky,’ no problem. People can say ‘Mfoniso.’”

And they most certainly are. Today, Udofia is a celebrated television writer who has worked on Netflix’s “13 Reasons Why,” “Little America” and “Pachinko” on Apple TV, and more.

But at her core, the 38-year-old first-generation Nigerian American is a storyteller, playwright, actor and educator who focuses on the African immigration experience in the United States — told in a way that caught the attention of Sag Harbor resident and psychoanalyst Dr. Robby Stein, who serves with Udofia on the board of directors at SPACE on Ryder Farm, a nonprofit organic operation in Brewster.

“Working with her has made me much more aware of all kinds of things I would not normally be aware of,” he said. “I’m a pretty good listener, because I’m a shrink — you have to be — but she has taught me, through her character, about a different kind of listening.

“I think the question of, ‘How do you listen to a community, coming from outside a community?’ You might get a different response than you think.”

Taking the pulse of the village’s creative community, Stein and his wife, writer Alex McNear, are now the co-curators of a new developing program called “Writers Voices,” set to begin with Udofia on Saturday, October 8, from 5 to 7 p.m. at The Church in Sag Harbor.

“The goal was to find writers of all different backgrounds — some well-known, some emerging — that we would look for people who were a work in progress,” McNear said. “So this would be a little different from the traditional reading, where a writer comes in and they read a work that’s been published. This would be they’re reading from a play or a short story that was in the works.”

Earlier this month, Udofia was torn between two plays to present. The first, “Sojourners,” is one of the nine plays in her series “The Ufot Family Cycle” — seven of which are already written. The entire sequence envisions the immigrant experience of a Nigerian family, from their arrival in America in 1968 through 2051.

Udofia’s own family emigrated from Nigeria to Houston, Texas, in the 1970s, and moved to Massachusetts when she was 5 years old. Her childhood in Southbridge was as small-town as it got, she recalled: There was one main store, high school revolved around football, and the street lights shut off at 7 p.m.

But with her parents, Udofia lived in an entirely different existence — one that centered on Nigerian language and cuisine, like fufu and egusi soup, and did not leave the walls of their home.

“They were very distinctive worlds, and they did not bleed,” she said. “So I don’t know that the students at school knew that I might not be eating their food, that there was a whole different language, that I had a whole different cultural system at play. I didn’t share that. I didn’t start living out loud the way I did at home until I was in college.”

At her parents’ suggestion, Udofia studied political science at Wellesley College and planned to become an attorney, all the while dabbling in the arts — a continuation of her high school days playing trombone and seeing Broadway shows. But in college, as she learned opera and performed in plays with Ethos, the black student union, she came into her own.

“It’s not until college where I started seeing people who were Nigerian and watching how they kind of expressed outside the home,” she said. “I started to, too. There really is something to be said about education.”

Udofia would go on to earn her MFA in acting from the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco and moved to New York, where she hired an agent and auditioned for theatrical productions. When she struggled to land role after role, she turned to writing — and her journey officially began.

In the process, she has learned that each of her plays starts with a question.

“There is something I’m trying to figure out,” she said. “And I never, ever get to the answer. I just get to different ways of figuring out what potential answers could be. I never reach a definitive, and it helps me understand parts of the world.”

In “runboyrun” — a play in “The Ufot Family Cycle” that she is considering reading during “Writers Voices” — the question is: When does a trauma become tradition? The search for the answer felt like a channeling, a haunting, the playwright explained. It affected her mood and came after her in her sleep.

“That one was like breaking my head open, my heart open and technically more than I thought I could do at the time,” she said. “The process can open me up into different kinds of humanity, loving different parts of humanity that I don’t think I did before. It can stress my writer’s pen. It can also then give me a lot of empathy for the characters that I’m writing about that might have similar thrusts to some people I might know — and go, ‘Maybe in the writing of you, maybe I understand now why you are this way.’”

In retrospect, Udofia tells the story of her teacher who encouraged her to shorten her name — “‘Mfoniso’ would be too difficult for people,” she recalled — with compassion, empathy and wisdom, and a refusal to move backward, only forward, with all parts of herself.

“I am extraordinarily Nigerian,” she said. “For me, holding on was just figuring out how to hold everything without dropping anything — and just looking at anybody who’s confused and say, ‘I’m sorry. That’s what it is.’”