Groundbreaking Ufot Family Cycle launches this fall

BOSTON – It is an initiative groundbreaking in both its length and breadth, a nine-play cycle to be performed over the next two years all across Greater Boston at a large variety of venues, with a lengthy list of partners, including theaters, non-profit groups and the City of Boston’s arts and cultural agency.And, to help insure its success, The Huntington is leading the way, contributing time, talent and other resources and hosting the first two plays in the series.

Playwright Mfonsio’s Udofia’s Ufot Family Cycle kicks off with “Sojourners” on Oct. 31 at The Huntington Theatre, directed by Dawn M. Simmons. The eight other plays will also follow three generations of a Nigerian-American family who emigrated to the United States.

It is the result of two years of convening, planning, and investment by The Huntington to incubate and create this one-of-a-kind event that will begin this fall in October and end in July 2026.

The initiative was unveiled at a press conference on Tuesday, June 25 at Boston City Hall, attended by many of the involved stakeholders.

The cycle is a result of extensive discussions between The Huntington’s artistic director, Loretta Greco, and Udofia, who was raised in Southbridge and graduated from Wellesley College, which is one of the partners in the initiative and will host one of the plays as part of its Wellesley Repertory Theater. Greco produced three of Udofia’s works while at the Magic Theater in San Francisco before joining The Huntington in 2022.

The far-ranging list of collaborative partners brings together arts institutions, universities, social organizations, non-profits, and a host of community activation partners across Greater Boston, who will collaborate on the creation and public activation of the cycle.

Partners currently include AfroDesiaCity, ArtsEmerson, The Barr Foundation, Boston Arts Academy, The Boston Foundation, Boston Lyric Opera, Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, Boston Public Art Triennial, Boston Public Library, Boston Public Schools, Boston University, Central Square Theater, Coolidge Corner Theater, DiasporaMass, Embrace Boston, Facing History & Ourselves, Front Porch Arts Collective, GBH, The Huntington, Kligerman Productions, The Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture, Next Chapter Podcasts, Nigerian Professionals Group, Northeastern University, Prior Performing Arts Center at the College of the Holy Cross, Roxbury Community College, Venturous Theater Fund of the Tides Foundation, Wellesley College, Wellesley Repertory Theatre, West End House, Wheelock Family Theatre, and ZUMIX, with others to be announced in the coming months.

All nine plays in the cycle will be fully produced, beginning this fall at The Huntington with its productions of the first play Sojourners, the origin story of the matriarch of the family, and the second play, The Grove, in February of 2025; the following 7 plays of the cycle will be produced by a series of arts organizations and community partners over the next two years through the summer of 2026. Boston’s Ufot Family Cycle includes premieres of five of the plays and marks the first time that the cycle will be experienced in its entirety and in Udofia’s intended order, representing a major collaborative project with an expansive scale and scope not imagined elsewhere in the country and only made possible in Boston.

Each of the nine plays will have community activation partners – a unique cohort that brings together disparate segments of Boston’s arts and culture sector to collaborate in new ways, both lifting and generating audiences for the artistic work itself and imagining a new model for institutional collaboration with portals for access to artmaking, civic transformation, and education for all ages.

Four of the plays (Sojourners, runboyrun, Her Portmanteau, and In Old Age) have been previously produced to great acclaim at theatres including New York Theatre Workshop, The Playwrights Realm, Magic Theatre, and American Conservatory Theatre. Udofia’s plays have been called “extraordinary” by The New York Times, which writes that they “offer a moving and powerful corrective to the notion that what immigrants leave behind is always awful, and that what they find is always worth the trip.” New York Theater called them an “enlightening and binge-worthy family saga that updates the story of immigrant America.”

At Wellesley College, Udofia had her first experience with The Huntington through her Africana Studies class when Professor Selwyn R. Cudjoe took students to see Gem of the Ocean and introduced her to playwright August Wilson (1945-2005). To see herself onstage, reflected in Wilson’s ten-play American Century Cycle, with each set in a different decade of the 20th century about Black American life, was influential years before she would pursue her career in playwriting and return to Wellesley as a faculty member of the Albright Institute. Using Wilson’s model, she set out to create an emotionally engrossing cycle of nine plays that follow one Nigerian American family through three generations: parents, children, grandchildren. Each play stands alone brilliantly, yet together forms a stunning tapestry that will resonate with everyone.

The Ufot Family Cycle represents a profound investment in an artist of great vision, humanity, and humor. The Huntington’s Greco envisioned this city-wide festival celebrating Udofia’s work and describes it as “a commitment to cultural aspiration of the highest caliber with the sincere intention of making great art which pushes the culture forward, challenging and revitalizing the American canon.”

“I’m writing these plays for myself, for my immediate family, for my extended family, for the Ibibio community,” says Udofia. “I’m writing us — so we can see us. I believe my work incites community action. When one cares about a character so much they are crying for them, they usually cannot meet a similar person in life and instantaneously judge them. A dramatic telling of an immigrant story, when done well, can cause an audience to change irrevocably in the moment. These audience members will then leave the building and enter their own communities with newfound empathy.”

Mfoniso’s own experience informs the Cycle as her parents immigrated to Texas from Nigeria in the 1970s, had children, and then moved to the Boston area because of the educational opportunities available. Udofia’s mother was a biologist, and her father was a scholar of West African studies.

The New York Times states, “While building empathy is important to Ms. Udofia, as she continues to work on the rest of the ‘Ufot’ plays, she is also unapologetic about the fact that she isn’t writing the Cycle for a traditional theatre audience.” Mfoniso spoke about this during several Boston community meetings in 2023, stating her intentions to be an active participant in meeting community members where they are to inform the making of the remaining Cycle plays.

Over the past 2 years, The Huntington has hosted salons and gatherings to build a coalition of partnering artists and organizations, in addition to hosting writing residencies and many workshops to develop work in the cycle. In fall 2024, the nine-play Cycle will kick off with The Huntington’s productions of Sojourners (followed by The Grove in 2025). The Huntington will also serve as a motherboard of resources and connection to bolster the creative process and success of the remaining seven productions that will be mounted through 2026 by and with arts organizations, universities, social organizations, non-profits, and a host of community activation partners.

Each of the productions will be professionally filmed by partner Kligerman Productions in order to expand the reach of the project and preserve it in perpetuity, allowing the Ufot Family Cycle to be taught in educational settings as part of the American theatrical canon.

The Ufot Family Cycle has received support from The Barr Foundation, The Boston Foundation, and the Venturous Theater Fund of the Tides Foundation, as well as the Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture in the City of Boston. More partners are expected to be announced soon.

For more information on the entire Ufot Family Cycle schedule, go to huntingtontheatre.org or bostontheatrescene.com.