Yes, It’s Tough to Be a Playwright: creation stories and all the important importants

If there’s one trend in contemporary playwriting that’s really starting to drain me, it’s the Look How Hard This Is for Me to Write plays. There’s been a steady crop of them since COVID, and sure, no wonder: It’s rough out there. Politically, spiritually, institutionally, financially, environmentally, psychologically — pick your adverb. When neighbors are disappearing and children are being slaughtered, any artist’s head can get pretty messed up, including on the subject of (presumably somewhere at the bottom of a long list) whether telling stories on a stage matters, whether you have anything to say, and whether you’re saying it right. 

That wrestling match itself, however, makes for compelling theater about as often as the camel squeezes through the needle. There’s something tone-deaf about it, a weird irony of taking up space with your own fretting about how or whether you should. Earlier this year, César Alvarez spent far too much of their play The Potluck having their onstage avatar wiggle around on the hook of writing The Potluck. (“But also, I have this commission. So it’s sort of my job.”) I long for greater courage: Push through. Find the thing on the other side and start there. Or don’t! In the words of Mikhail Bulgakov, “Aren’t there enough plays already?”

Well, now we have one more. Mfoniso Udofia’s creation stories and all the important importants, directed by Tamilla Woodard in its premiere at Lincoln Center’s Claire Tow Theater, tells the story of a woman (Abigail C. Onwunali) who, in most respects, resembles Mfoniso Udofia. She’s in her 40s, Nigerian-American, a high-achieving playwright and teacher — technically, she’s even named Mfoniso, though the play obscures that fact. When we first see her, she’s asleep, experiencing a recurring dream in which a spirit creature (Donetta Lavinia Grays), decked out in traditional raffia, dances through her subconscious, trying to awaken her to something she’s not ready to face. When she gets out of bed, she bulldozes into her day with teeth-gritting girlboss energy, calling out orders to her Alexa (Grays again, in voiceover) and narrating her every move in the third person. “thegrownwoman centers,” she says, while doing so. “thegrownwoman focuses. thegrownwoman begins her day … thegrownwoman looks up … thegrownwoman stands…”

About two thirds of Udofia’s 95-minute play consists of Onwunali barrelling around the stage describing her own actions. She’s a strong actor (in last spring’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, her late-in-the-story entrance ratcheted the drama to a whole new level), but this is punishing material, monotonous and heavyhanded. Seven years ago, in reviewing Udofia’s runboyrun and In Old Age — two plays from her nine-play Ufot Cycle, which is unfolding in its entirety in Boston — I wrote that the playwright “never does something once or twice when she can do it on a continuous loop.” I wish I could say that’s changed, but Udofia remains committed to reiteration far past the point of dramatic efficacy.

She also loves a symbol that may as well be posted in neon. As “thegrownwoman” goes about her increasingly exhausting day — she’s trying to balance writing, teaching, caretaking a parent and self-care with her fifth round of IVF, and her chances of pregnancy aren’t looking good — she’s being trailed by an invisible-to-her little girl (Savannah Commodore). At no point are we in doubt as to the implication: This is the adult’s child self, back when she was bubbling with hope and creativity, back when all it took to make up a good story was a little playtime and some help from Mr. Cornell, the horse embroidered on her favorite blanket. (Grays later  embodies this imaginary equine friend, and the rapper–on–Sesame Street energy she brings is a welcome if too-delayed change of pace.) Thegrownwoman is struggling to create — she can’t write and can’t seem to conceive — but if she’d only listen to the little girl…

A play like creation stories is a frustratingly alienating experience: Here’s a protagonist who, by all rights, should be deeply sympathetic — a woman trying to fight her way through capitalism, trying to be an artist and a teacher and, she hopes against hope, a mother; a woman who “did everything” to the best of her ability and yet is badly stuck, in desperate need of something to spring her from the trap of her own weariness and unacknowledged grief. The circumstances are objectively potent — but Udofia smothers them in such a barrage of cutesiness and self-conscious signalling that a wall rises between us and the play. What we end up watching isn’t a character suffering, changing, learning, but a writer doing a self-circling performance. In a particularly cringy sequence, we become thegrownwoman’s students as she teaches her college playwriting course, asking us to juxtapose the work of “Simon & Simon” with the plays of Etienam Akpabio. Both are Udofia’s own creations: “The playwright conceptualized Simon & Simon after teaching — and reteaching — Louis E. Catron and Norman A. Bert’s The Elements of Playwriting,” she writes in one of the script’s many footnotes. As for Akpabio, she represents the feminine and anti-Aristotelian: “dramas that are sometimes randomly cruel, or sometimes randomly beautiful — or most problematically… just plain random,” thegrownwoman rhapsodizes. It’s one thing to help an audience learn your dramatic vocabulary. It’s another to put them through a patronizing lesson in your implicitly unconventional and superior mode of playwriting.

In the end, creation stories feels a bit like an internal pep talk for which an audience didn’t necessarily need to be present. It may touch on things that can make viewers feel seen, but its central concern is performing a kind of therapy for its own protagonist — and thus, really, for its own writer. On the third full page of notes at the top of her script, before the play itself begins, Udofia writes: “this play came from a commission where i was asked to write exactly what i wanted. this play is what kept coming out of me… even when i did not want to write it. it nearly broke me. my brain. my heart. my body. oh the pain of this. oh the patience of this.”

Oh, the many, many writers who dream of such commissions. Oh, the fallacy of thinking that just because something hurts, it is profound. 

creation stories and all the important importants is at the Claire Tow Theater at Lincoln Center through November 1.