Here in “The Grove,” language takes on a deeper shade of reality. Words are lived and breathed on the stage of the Calderwood Pavilion more fully than they ever can be in the waking world. There is a cacophony of English and Ibibio, with each tongue insisting upon itself. Shadow becomes substance, and substance slips into the sublime.
“The Grove” is a new play by Nigerian American writer Mfoniso Udofia. It forms the second piece out of nine in her groundbreaking Ufot Family Cycle. The Huntington Theatre Company is staging the Ufot Family Cycle over the course of two years — a massive theatrical undertaking. The plays span generations and decades, taking place from 1978 to the 2070s. “The Grove” is set in Worcester, Mass. in 2009 and focuses on the story of eldest daughter Adiaha Ufot (Abigail C. Onwunali).
Scenic Designer Jason Ardizzone-West’s rotating sets household mundanity against a forest of silver bars, which shimmer not unlike mirrors. The silver bars give the stage — and the story, by extension — a refractive quality. “The Grove” is grounded by this prison but, at the same time, is liberated by it. The Ufot family inhabits a space where the real and the abstract are permitted physical interaction.
In contrast with the heaviness of the plot, the dialogue of “The Grove” is buoyant. The actors deliver their lines in such a way that even the plainest prose has a poetic slant. The energies of Adiaha’s uncles Udosen Udoh (Paul-Robert Pryce) and Godwin Inyang (Maduka Steady) are particularly light. Adiaha and her fraying nuclear family, meanwhile, are the play’s anchor. Abasiama (Patrice Johnson Chevannes) and Disciple (Joshua Olumide) are Adiaha’s Nigerian immigrant parents who are at odds with each other and their children. Ekong (Amani Kojo) and Toyoima (Aisha Wura Akorede) are Adiaha’s siblings who are confoundingly American to Disciple and Abasiama. At the very center of it all is Adiaha, a poet fresh out of graduate school whose true self butts heads with her family’s expectations.
The dynamic between Adiaha and the shadows (Ekemini Ekpo, Janelle Grace, Patrice Jean-Baptiste, Chibuba Bloom Osuala and Rebekah Brunson) is what makes “The Grove” the play that it is. The shadows are Adiaha’s matriarchal ancestors; her art acts as their conduit to the present. The shadows form a haunting chorus, ululating in Ibibo. They are frequently shrouded in darkness and obscured by the forest of silver bars. Tethers to the inherited past are an essential part of the Ufot family’s story, and the shadows are the purest manifestation of this.
Onwunali’s performance as Adiaha is powerful and singular. Over the course of the play’s two-hour run time, the audience becomes intimately acquainted with Adiaha’s fears, dreams and being. What Adiaha wants most is to be seen and be heard by a family that struggles to accept her vocation as well as her sexuality. Adiaha’s relationship with childhood friend Kimberley Gaines (Valyn Lyric Turner) is at times a light in her life and at other times a shameful secret. Adiaha must reconcile her Nigerian identity with her gay identity — and do so with the weight of culture, tradition and religion on her shoulders. Onwunali makes this reconciliation so visceral that the act of witnessing it crosses into a kind of emotional voyeurism.
When Adiaha is reciting her poetry, Udofia’s writing is at its most transcendent. Verse is celebrated in its most natural oral state. Throughout the play, there is a growing reciprocity between Adiaha and the shadows; she tells their story, and they heighten hers. The shadows are the muse, and Adiaha is the artist. The full bloom of this partnership is what “The Grove” builds to. English marries Ibibio, as the living is with the dead, and the new is with the old.
The most potent metaphor the play presents is that of a family being trees in a grove — with seeds that must be planted and roots that run deep. The fruit of Adiaha’s labor as a tree in the Ufot grove is harmony with her past, her present and herself. The joyous, climatic ending of “The Grove” is hard-won, and the strife makes it all the sweeter.
