By Bill Marx

Abigail C. Onwunali’s powerhouse performance is memorable, but the mechanics of Mfoniso Udofia’s play don’t always match the lead’s boundary-stretching strengths.

Sojourners by Mfoniso Udofia. Directed by Dawn M. Simmons. Staged by the Huntington Theatre Company at the Huntington Stage, 264 Huntington Avenue, Boston, through December 1.

Nomè SiDone and Abigail C. Onwunali in the Huntington Theatre Company production of Sojourners. Photo: Marc J. Franklin

On occasion, a powerful stage performance can be so bright that it tosses some shade around, and that is the case with Abigail C. Onwunali’s blazing star turn in the Huntington Theatre Company’s occasionally heavy-handed production of Mfoniso Udofia’s moving though somewhat stodgy drama. Sojourners is the first in Udofia’s nine-play Ufot Family Cycle, which is dedicated to chronicling the experiences of three generations of a Nigerian American family. Over the next two seasons, all the scripts in the series will be produced in the Greater Boston area by way of an unprecedented feat of citywide collaboration. In this “origin” text, Onwunali takes on the role of Abasiama, the spirited matriarch of the clan, a character who, in this drama, undergoes an immigrant variation on the march toward liberation in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. The narrative focuses on a young woman’s struggle to assert her individuality; she has to deal with formidable obstacles, including bewildered people (including a manipulative husband) and a freewheeling society (late ’70s America).

It is 1978 and Abasiama is the stalwart linchpin of a young Nigerian couple (an arranged marriage) who are living in Houston to earn their degrees and then return home. She is pregnant, studying biology, and working at night at a gas station; her husband, Ukpong, is majoring in economics but he is neglecting his academic studies. He would rather drink beer, listen to popular music, and take America up on its invitation to reinvent oneself, to feel comfortable doing what you like to do when you want to do it. No matter who you hurt. The clash is between taking responsibility — for others and for yourself — or embracing the pleasures of being free, perhaps to the point of self-destruction. When it comes to setting up the major conflict between Ukpong and Abasiama, Udofia stacks the dramatic deck: he is a charmer, but transparently weak-willed and deceptive; his wife, on the other hand, is vibrant and human, empathetic and determined. Abasiama is such a force of nature that she attracts two other characters desperately in search of the kind of nurturing companionship she provides: Disciple, a loquacious Nigerian student driven by religious zeal, and the neurotically vivacious Moxie, a sex worker who grows to understand that a friendship with Abasiama will help her find a new route in life.

Udofia’s Abasiama is a powerfully complex heroine, and the dramatist has fleshed her out vividly. This is a pragmatic but caring soul who learns how to protect herself, how to deal with those who stand in the way of her autonomy. Onwunali encompasses the woman’s contradictions splendidly: steeliness and warmth, passivity and determination, intelligence and intuition. On top of that, the performer invests her portrait with plenty of physical/psychological detailing — note Abasiama’s joyful response to eating a Snickers bar or her cocked eyebrows, which can signal either incredulity or slow-boiling anger. Onwunali’s Abasiama is so fabulously rounded it throws the one-note performances of the supporting cast into relief. SiDone’s Ukpong clings to a naughty boy attitude, while the figures in extremis — Joshua Olumide’s Disciple and Asha Basha Duniani’s Moxie — are consistently pitched too high.

Along with Dawn M. Simmons’s broad direction of the supporting cast, the script’s thin depiction of the era’s social tensions also disappoints. American dramas tend to focus on domestic dysfunction — it is safer than facing thorny political issues. At one point, Disciple explains to the audience why privileged Nigerians headed to America (“low American tuition rates, lax immigration law, and the demand for Nigerian wealth”). It is interesting that there is nothing here on how the Texas university is treating African students. Also left unmentioned: since its independence in 1960, Nigeria’s history of civilian governance has been checkered with periods of authoritarian military rule. (The Nigerian Armed Forces held power from 1966 to 1999 — there was an interregnum from 1979 to 1983.) It would have been illuminating to place Ukpong, Disciple, and Abasiama’s contrasting visions of their home country in this context. Ironically, at the moment, Nigeria is a struggling democracy, just as ours is.

Finally, while Onwunali’s powerhouse performance is memorable, the mechanics of Udofia’s play don’t always match the lead’s boundary-stretching strengths. There are bad habits here, shared by other contemporary dramatists who have been schooled in writing for the movies or for TV. Characters explain themselves rather than let the audience make sense of their actions, and there are repeated bits of business (such as Moxie, feeling threatened, pulling out her switchblade) that come off as comic shtick. So it is reassuring that some of the other entries in the Ufot Family Cycle will move away from kitchen sink realism. Four of of the plays, Sojourners, runboyrun, Her Portmanteau, and In Old Age, have been performed previously, but five of the other scripts have yet to be staged, including the final work in the series, Adiaha and Clora Snatch Joy, a folk opera (score by Nehemiah Luckett) that will be produced by the Huntington Theatre Company and the Boston Lyric Opera. It will be interesting to see how Udofia evolves as a storyteller in this ambitious cycle, where she journeys after the solid first step of Sojourners.

Bill Marx is the editor-in-chief of the Arts Fuse. For four decades, he has written about arts and culture for print, broadcast, and online. He has regularly reviewed theater for National Public Radio Station WBUR and the Boston Globe. He created and edited WBUR Online Arts, a cultural webzine that in 2004 won an Online Journalism Award for Specialty Journalism. In 2007 he created the Arts Fuse, an online magazine dedicated to covering arts and culture in Boston and throughout New England.