Review: Central Square Theater and Front Porch Arts Collective's HER PORTMANTEAU Packs a Lot Into Fraught Family Meeting

In “Sojourners,” the first play in the nine-part Ufot Family Cycle by first-generation Nigerian American playwright Mfoniso Udofia – presented last fall by the Huntington – Boston audiences met Abasiama, a hardworking Nigerian living in Houston, Texas, in 1978 and working toward a degree in biology.

The biology of the genetics behind human connections is what provides the beating heart of Udofia’s compelling Ufot family cycle. In February, the Huntington presented the second play in the cycle, “The Grove,” set in Worcester in 2009 and again featuring the Abasiama character.  Now through April 20, Central Square Theater and Front Porch Arts Collective are presenting the 2014-set “Her Portmanteau,” another impossible-to-look-away-from installment in the cycle, at the Central Square Theater.

Under Tasia A. Jones’s well-paced direction, “Her Portmanteau” finds Abasiama (played this time out by the formidable Patrice Jean-Baptiste, who understudied the role in “The Grove”) spending a fraught day with her daughters, Adiaha Ufot (a luminous Lorraine Victoria Kanyike) and Iniabasi Ekpeyong (a riveting Jade A. Guerra, who was another strong character, Berniece, in the Actors’ Shakespeare Project’s magnificent mounting of August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson” earlier this year) in Adiaha’s small New York apartment.

Iniabasi was Abasiama’s infant who moved home to Nigeria with her father, leaving her mother in the United States. Abasiama’s eager-to-please younger daughter, Adiaha, from her second troubled marriage, was born and brought up in the United States. In Udofia’s exquisite writing, questions from the pasts of these characters come to life in sometimes fiery form.

Family strife is apparent from the outset when an all-but-silent Iniabasi places her timeworn suitcase, a reflection of her ever-present emotional baggage, down in her sister’s home – a tidy single-room set with attractive accent pieces, designed by Shelley Barish – where she is welcomed by her kindly half-sister. The discord is immediate, however, as off-stage it was exacerbated when Adiaha was late picking up her sister at the airport.

The stone-faced silence with which Iniabasi considers Adiaha’s nervous explanation for her tardiness leads the latter to believe her guest can only converse in Ibibio, the Nigerian dialect Adiaha understands but can’t speak. It’s soon apparent, however, that Iniabasi does speak English, creating an early fissure in what Adiaha wants so much to be a smooth relationship.

In Ibibio, which is artfully woven through this production, the role of the adiaha could manifest colloquially as the “third parent,” according to a program note by dramaturg Elijah Estolano Punzal. As the program note explains, “Given her namesake, we see Adiaha performing the role as the adiaha in ‘Her Portmanteau’ as well ‘The Grove,’ attending to the needs and wellbeing of her parents and siblings, through emotional, mental, physical, and economic labor as well as putting others before herself – swallowing her own wants and needs until she can no longer contain them.”

Iniabasi’s long-simmering anger comes to a boil when their stong-willed mother, Abasiama, whom, whom Jean-Baptiste’s portrays as both warm and off-putting, arrives at Adiaha’s apartment. That parenting is anything but second nature to Abasiama is obvious from her first dealings with her two very different daughters. All three actors are achingly authentic as the mother and her two half-daughters weave in and around each other in search of a way to bond. In Kanyike and Guerra’s hands, the early interaction between the welcoming Adiaha and the apprehensive Iniabasi brings the characters forward as individuals, while also providing insight into their commonalities and the toll being the children of the complex Abasiama takes on them.  

As they cautiously move toward each other, we see that when it comes to a fractured family, harder truths must be faced if there is to be any hope of healing.