The grown woman in Mfoniso Udofia’s new play, “Creation Stories and All the Important Importants,” is not great at embracing uncertainty. From the time she was a tween, she has followed a plan, diligently constructing a future. Barreling through her days at a purposeful pace, mostly she’s aced what she’s aimed for.
But one stubborn piece of the successful life she envisions has yet to be willed into place. So here she is, persevering with a fifth grueling cycle of in vitro fertilization: the injections, the bloodwork, the self-recrimination as the last shreds of hope threaten to disintegrate.
Udofia calls her main character thegrownwoman, blurring the words together as if, in all her racing around, there isn’t time for spaces between them.
Focused and disciplined, determined to be healthy, the grown woman does an online search for exercise safety and I.V.F. “Do you want to hear more about infertility in Black women like you?” her virtual assistant Alexa asks brightly, following up. At least to a machine, the grown woman doesn’t mind brusquely saying no. To actual humans out in the world, she shows only her upbeat facade. To the degree that she can get away with it, that’s what she shows herself, too.
Directed by Tamilla Woodard for LCT3 at the Claire Tow Theater, this haunted, surreally comic, tender heartbreaker of a play is about what happens when the thing you want so badly that it stalks your dreams slips out of reach.
“Forward,” the grown woman habitually urges herself. That perseverance is how she became a professional writer — a creator by trade. But her body’s refusal to cooperate in creating a new life leaves her with no idea how to move forward in her own.
Fair warning, in case that synopsis smooths too many edges: This is a meticulously imagined play, beautifully performed, but it isn’t neat, conventional or easy. It asks its audience to exist for a time, like the grown woman, in a state of some uncertainty.
Abigail C. Onwunali, who channeled a hurricane force on Broadway earlier this year in Debbie Allen’s revival of “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” is instantly grounding as the grown woman — funny, hectic, charming. Opposite her is another dexterously nuanced actor from that production, Savannah Commodore, who there played a solemn, self-possessed 11-year-old.
In “Creation Stories,” Commodore’s character is called simply the little girl, and she is darling in her pigtails and polka-dot dress. (Costumes are by Sarafina Bush.) We aren’t sure for a while quite who she is, but it’s no spoiler to say that she is the grown woman’s 10-year-old self: the exuberantly creative spirit she was just before she obediently put away childish things and turned her attention to the future.
You know how people love to say, when they hit some marvelous milestone, that their kid self — whose fantasy this was — would be thrilled by the accomplishment? For the trombone-playing little girl, this is the opposite of that. She is a keen-eyed child, and as she observes the grown woman, what registers in her face is not pride but worry.
This calculated, stressed-out life is not the one they meant to have decades ago, when they spent their days making up adventures with their trusty magical horse, Mr. Cornell. He is played initially by a raspberry pink blanket, because he is the product of a child’s imagination, and then by the reliably terrific Donnetta Lavinia Grays. In blanket form, by the way, Mr. Cornell doubles as the little girl’s cape.
Udofia has devoted years to writing about a fictional Nigerian American family in a nine-play cycle that includes the dramas “Sojourners” and “Her Portmanteau.” The cycle’s final work, “Adia & Clora Snatch Joy,” will have its premiere next month in Boston. “Creation Stories” is not a part of that cycle, yet the grown woman’s Nigerian heritage shapes her worldview, and her perfectionism is rooted in the responsibility she feels as the daughter of immigrants.
On Jason Ardizzone-West’s rounded, swirling set, lit with wonderful clarity by Alan C. Edwards, we watch the moment everything changed for the grown woman, when she was an uninhibited child who made silly videos of herself performing. (Projection design is by Katherine Freer.) Off camera, inaudible to us, her mother interrupts a video in progress to get her daughter back on task.
“Yes,” the little girl says, chastened. “I know the story of how we got here. Many sacrifices were made so we could have a life like this.”
Ever since, she has worked to make her family proud, and it terrifies her to fail at that — as she defines failure — in any way.
The ending of “Creation Stories” is unabashedly sentimental, but its peace is a balm. A different future awaits, and a little girl and a magical horse can help with that.
Creation Stories and All the Important Importants Through Nov. 1 at the Claire Tow Theater, Manhattan; lct.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes.
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