Arts & Theatre · Theatre · Drama

creation stories and all the important importants

On tour

Every date the ticketer lists, worldwide · venue time

Arts & Theatre · UScreation stories and all the important importantsLincoln Center - Claire Tow Theater · New York

Tickets Arts & Theatre · UScreation stories and all the important importantsLincoln Center - Claire Tow Theater · New York

Tickets

The profile · researched 23 September 2026

A conjure story for the drained: Mfoniso Udofia opens her first play at LCT3

Mfoniso Udofia spent two and a half years watching Boston stage all nine plays of her Ufot Family Cycle; her new solo work, a folktale about a midlife Black woman and her many selves, is in previews at Lincoln Center Theater's smallest house ahead of a 1 October opening.

A commission that took five years to answer

The play now in previews at the Claire Tow Theater did not start at Lincoln Center. Udofia has said she carried a commission from New York Theatre Workshop for about five years before the piece found its form, and that she went looking for that form in fairy tales. What she wanted, she told American Theatre in the week before the first preview, was "a conjure story for good Black women who had done everything right, who had become drained of their color".

What emerged is a folktale about a midlife Black woman pulled between her many selves — child, future daughter, artist, possible mother. Udofia's own summary of the arc is that the woman has lost essential parts of herself and that "as the day darkens, her child-self, and her own unruly creative engine, rise up to rescue her". Lincoln Center Theater's description of the piece has it moving across time and space, from ancestor to AI, from dream cycle to IVF cycle, carried by music and ritual.

New York heard it before the production existed. On 23 March 2026 the script was read once, at 6.30pm, as part of LCT's Reading Series — an evening curated by Ayad Akhtar, directed by Rachel Chavkin, and performed by Abigail C. Onwunali, Sasha Manuel, Anastacia McCleskey and Udofia herself. Onwunali is the one who carried through to the staged production, where she plays the character billed as thegrownwoman.

Houston to Massachusetts, and a question that stuck

Udofia's parents left Nigeria for Houston in the 1970s and eventually settled in Massachusetts, where she grew up. She read political science at Wellesley College and was heading towards law until a classmate asked her whether it brought her joy; the answer was no, she has said, so she started exploring. She took an MFA in acting at American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco and then moved to New York, and she still describes herself first as a storyteller and actor rather than only a writer.

The question underneath almost all of her work was put plainly in a 2025 interview about The Grove: "What does it mean to self-individuate when you're from a collectivist culture?" It is the engine of the family cycle and, in a different key, of the new play — a woman trying to become a self while several other versions of her make competing claims.

The writing career has run on two tracks. Alongside the plays she has worked as a television writer-producer on 13 Reasons Why, Little America, Pachinko, A League of Their Own and Let the Right One In. The awards are stage awards: the Helen Merrill Playwright Award in 2017, the McKnight National Residency and Commission at the Playwrights' Center in 2017-18, the Horton Foote Award in 2021, membership of the New Dramatists class of 2023 and the Steinberg Playwright Award in 2024, plus Edgerton New Play Awards for Sojourners, runboyrun and Her Portmanteau.

Nine plays, one family, a hundred years

The work Udofia is known for is the Ufot Family Cycle: nine plays following three generations of a Nigerian American family across a span running from 1978 to 2078. Four of them — Sojourners, runboyrun, Her Portmanteau and In Old Age — had circulated on their own for years. The whole cycle had never been staged in sequence anywhere.

That changed in Boston. The Huntington's artistic director Loretta Greco and Udofia met in a Boston bar around 2022 to work out how it might be done; the project was announced in June 2024 with the Huntington leading and more than two dozen partners attached, among them ArtsEmerson, Central Square Theater, Wellesley College, Boston Arts Academy, Front Porch Arts Collective, Boston Lyric Opera and GBH, with free pop-up performances planned for East Boston, Roxbury, Hyde Park and Worcester. The Huntington had put in two million dollars by that point and was seeking another one and a half million.

It ran roughly to plan. Sojourners opened at the Huntington in October 2024; The Grove and runboyrun followed in February and March 2025, Her Portmanteau in Cambridge that spring, Kufre n' Quay in July 2025, The Ceremony in Brookline that autumn, Lifted in March 2026 and In Old Age in June 2026. The finale, a folk opera called Adia & Clora Snatch Joy with music by Nehemiah Luckett, returns to the Huntington in November 2026 in partnership with Boston Lyric Opera. Udofia's account of the two and a half years is that more than thirty organisations ended up sharing designers, props and resources, and that "a movement formed around these plays, and Boston's theatre ecosystem became more community-oriented".

The room at the Claire Tow

LCT3 is the smallest of Lincoln Center Theater's three houses — 112 seats, opened in June 2012, set aside for artists new to the building. Maria Manuela Goyanes took over as its artistic director with the 2025-26 season, and creation stories and all the important importants is the first title of the season she has programmed. It shares that season with Pretend It's Pretend, a new play by Emma Watkins directed by Annie Tippe, and the return of the Comedy Series in spring 2027. For Udofia it is an LCT3 debut.

Tamilla Woodard directs. She chairs the acting programme at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale and is a resident director at Yale Repertory Theatre, was the inaugural BOLD associate artistic director at WP Theater and co-artistic director of the Working Theater, co-founded the site-specific company PopUP Theatrics, and was associate director on Hadestown in its first Broadway season.

Three actors cover the play's many selves. Abigail C. Onwunali plays thegrownwoman; Savannah Commodore is billed as little girl/the uncome; Donnetta Lavinia Grays takes the raffia/alexa/mr. cornell, a grouping that tells you roughly how far the piece travels between registers. Justyce Taylor understudies. The design team is Jason Ardizzone-West on sets, Sarafina Bush on costumes, Alan C. Edwards on lighting, Bailey Trierweiler and UptownWorks on sound, Katherine Freer on projections and Cassie J. Williams on hair and wigs, with movement direction by Adesola Osakalumi and stage management by Siena Yusi.

Where it stands now

Previews began on 15 September 2026, the same day Lincoln Center released the first production photographs. Playbill published behind-the-scenes rehearsal footage in the run-up. Opening night is 1 October and the limited run closes on 1 November, six weeks in total. No press verdicts exist yet: the critics do not see it until the opening, so anything written about the production so far is based on the rehearsal room rather than a finished performance.

American Theatre put Udofia in its People to Watch series on 14 September 2026, which produced the clearest recent statement of where she stands on the industry she has just spent two and a half years reorganising a city's worth of theatres around. She values rigour, she said, but "rigor without care becomes extraction", and she objects to treating exhaustion as proof of devotion. She has joined the board of the Playwrights Realm, the company that produced her first play, because of its focus on supporting writers at every stage rather than only at the start.

The practical position for the next few weeks is two premieres in two cities: a first play of her own in New York through 1 November, and the closing instalment of the nine-play cycle opening in Boston in November.

The show, now

An evening at the Claire Tow is a small one by design: 112 seats, a single set by Jason Ardizzone-West, and three actors — Abigail C. Onwunali, Savannah Commodore and Donnetta Lavinia Grays — handling every figure in the piece, from a child self and an unborn daughter to a voice assistant called alexa and a character named the raffia. There is no support act and no interval announced; Lincoln Center Theater has not published a running time. The form is closer to a folktale told with music and ritual than to a conventional three-act play, jumping between an ancestral register, a dream cycle and an IVF cycle, with projections by Katherine Freer and movement direction by Adesola Osakalumi doing much of the work of moving between them. Previews started on 15 September 2026 and press night is 1 October, so no reviews have been published; the only public sightings so far are the first-look production photographs released on 15 September and rehearsal footage posted by Playbill. Tickets are listed at $38.50, with LincTix seats at $33.50 online or $30 at the box office, and the run ends on 1 November.

Researched from lct.org · lct.org · playbill.com · playbill.com · newyorktheatreguide.com · broadwayworld.com · americantheatre.org · tdf.org