When an audience sits down to experience a new piece of theater, they usually see it in finished form: with clearly-drawn protagonists, directorial certainty, and a beginning, middle, and end.
But in the new workshop production of Mfoniso Udofia’s “Lifted,” the seventh play in her generations-spanning Ufot Family Cycle of nine plays, not everything has been figured out just yet.
Actors read from scripts onstage. Audiences are invited to give feedback after performances. And main character Toyoima Ufot, an American-born ethnomusicologist accused of plagiarizing the work of her late Nigerian father, is split into three separate roles, representing her clashing feelings of wrath and innocence, as well as the “front-facing” attitude she puts on for the world.
“I’ve been working on this play in some form since 2018,” Udofia said. “And I had been working on Toyoima as one single person, which is usually how plays are written — with one protagonist. And I realized that I was missing so much of her interiority … the inner landscape.”
Actress Natalie D. Jacobs, who portrayed Toyoima in previous Ufot play “The Ceremony,” returns in “Lifted” as Toyoima’s “front-facing persona.” Whereas “The Ceremony” saw her embrace the character’s wrath and penchant for wisecracks, she described this performance as being “all business.”
“I thought about being the mask,” Jacobs said. “I thought about being the conductor; the one that allows us to not only be safe, but the one that allows us to navigate and ascend within our career, [and] within academia.”
This survival behavior is complicated by the dissonance of the “wrath” persona, which sees the plagiarism allegations as an impossibility driven by a belief that knowledge descends via bloodlines. This is one of the central themes of the entire Ufot cycle, which Udofia describes as probing the Nigerian dream in America, and the “tension between the I, and the we, and who am I?”
Though Toyoima previously rejects her African heritage, her emotional crisis sends her to Nigeria in Act 3 to heal and immerse herself in Ufot family history. There, she picks up the language of Ibibio through local folk song — performed live onstage — and befriends Dr. Anthony Umanah, a Nigerian scholar who takes notice of her brilliance.
“I think one of the things that we discover in Act Three is that he sees something in her that nobody else can see,” said actor Paul Pryce, who portrays Anthony. “And he proclaims her to be a genius, because he sees her connection to the land. And throughout the play, there’s this constant, this return to the soil, a return to their land.”
Though “Lifted” is still a work-in-progress, Udofia hopes audiences take away that value of “community-based transmission” from her protagonist’s self-discovery, and look for the traditions “swirling inside” their own families.
“I hope when you come see this play, you leave asking yourself how you think knowledge passes, and what you think ownership of knowledge is and how you hold community,” she said.
Guests
- Mfoniso Udofia, award-winning playwright and the creator of the Ufot Family Cycle.
- Natalie D. Jacobs, actress portraying Toyoima Ufot in the seventh play of the cycle, “Lifted.”
- Paul Pryce, actor playing Nigerian scholar Dr. Anthony Umanah in “Lifted.”
