In Sojourners, the first play of Mfoniso Udofia’s Ufot Family Cycle series, audiences are introduced to Disciple, a graduate student who eventually becomes main character Abasiama’s husband and the Ufot patriarch. But as the group of plays unfold, Disciple grows increasingly erratic and intense, often prone to fits of rage. And it’s not until the third play in the cycle – runboyrun – that playwright Udofia focuses more on Disciple, peeling back his unraveling by centering his story and his past.
The story takes place entirely within one day, January 10th, but flashes between the years 2012, in which Disciple is living in Worcester, Mass., and 1968, when Disciple is 12 years old and living in Nigeria during the start of the Biafran War, also known as the Nigerian Civil War. Udofia says runboyrun shows the audience that Disciple has essentially been reliving his wartime trauma again and again.
“My inspiration was really getting inside the mind of Disciple and bringing us into his POV,” Udofia said. “He’s not an easy man. He’s not a well-behaved man. And there can be some distancing there, so it was important for me to bring us inside how he feels. And so the play itself slams us into his body, and he’s not existing in a linear plane like we are.”
Chiké Johnson, who plays Disciple, acknowledges that his character’s bad behavior could turn audiences against him.
“I don’t see him as a villain; I’ve never seen him as a villain,” Johnson said. “Yeah, he does bad stuff, but internally he’s trying to cope and he doesn’t know how to. He hasn’t been given the tools to cope, so he’s doing the best that he can. Unfortunately, the best is not good enough, but I would hope people wouldn’t completely write him off.”
"runboyrun"
Focusing on Disciple is not the only unique factor of runboyrun as part of the citywide Ufot Family Cycle production. While the first two plays, Sojourners and The Grove, were shown at the Huntington, and the fourth play, Her Portmanteau, was staged at Central Square Theater, runboyrun was performed only a few times in front of a live audience as a staged reading. Instead, it was adapted into an audio-only podcast with full sound design.
That podcast production also features a special actress playing Abasiama: playwright Udofia. Johnson said working alongside Udofia was an honor.
“I’ve been blessed to be in the room with a few playwrights, and all of them have been very generous and kind and collaborative and, Mfoniso, she’s my top three playwright to ever work with,” Johnson said. “I just wanted to do her play justice.”
Udofia said the entire series, including runboyrun, is written with love at its core.
“I am writing inside the break between realities,” Udofia said. “It’s flinty, it’s rough, it is hard. But Abasiama’s name literally means ‘remember love.’ ... In runboyrun, you will get to a place where a kind of imagination takes over, and towards the end of an endurance run through war and illness, you will get a moment of peace.”
The podcast version of runboyrun will be released weekly beginning June 16th, and will be available on all podcast platforms.
Guests
- Mfoniso Udofia, award-winning playwright and the creator of the Ufot Family Cycle
- Chiké Johnson, actor who plays Disciple in “runboyrun”
