By Bill Marx

Revelatory reunions are a standard dramatic setup, which explains why it takes quite a while for The Grove to gather some theatrical steam.

The Grove by Mfoniso Udofia. Directed by Awoye Timpo. Staged by the Huntington Theatre Company at The Huntington Calderwood, 527 Tremont St. Boston, through March 9.

Abigail C. Onwunali and Patrice Johnson Chevannes in The Huntington Theatre Company’s production of The Grove. Photo: Marc J. Franklin

Homecomings in the theater are usually fraught, particularly when generations are in conflict. In The Grove, the second play of Mfoniso Udofia’s nine-play Ufot Family Cycle, a gathering of the eponymous Nigerian-American family ends up in familiar meltdown mode. It is 2009 in Worcester, Massachusetts, and the ultra-religious Disciple (a suitor for protagonist Abasiama’s hand in the previous play in the series, Sojourners, set in 1978) is ordering about his embattled wife Abasiama and his rebellious teenage children, Toyoima and Ekong. He is getting the house gussied up for a party to honor his dependably obedient and successful daughter, Adiaha. The firstborn has returned home to be celebrated for her academic accomplishments: she graduated from NYU with an MA in Creative Writing months before. But Adiaha is acting strangely at the to-do. She is visibly nervous, upset by frequent phone calls from her Manhattan roommate Kim. And there’s tell-tale symbolism about ditching psychic clutter — rather than help mom in the kitchen, Adiaha chooses to clean out spider webs around the manse before company comes.

Revelatory reunions are a standard dramatic setup, usually a way to expose the delusions of a patriarch (e.g., Death of a Salesman). The internecine machinery has become rusty from overuse, which explains why it takes quite a while for The Grove to gather some theatrical steam. The usual sitcom/soap opera buttons are dutifully (rather than deftly) punched: there are “surprising” reveals about mom, personal squabbles and political/theological arguments among the relatives, surly talk-back from resentful kids, speculations about the troubled state of the marriage, etc. Adiaha is plainly uncomfortable with all the praise. It turns out that’s partly because she hasn’t told Disciple about a situation that’s crystal clear to her siblings (and probably to audience members from the get-go). Adiaha’s long friendship with artist Kim has turned into a gay romance. She is torn between living up to the dogmatic demands of her parents, obeying the strictures of the tradition, or striking out on her own, asserting her individuality.

What eventually lifts The Grove out of this worn groove? Shadows, described in the script as “women who comprise Adiaha’s lineage,” are bedeviling the young woman. It is not initially clear what these African spirits are up to. Are they out to pull Adiaha back into line with ancient demands? Are they violent avengers, like the Furies in Aeschylus’s Oresteia? Or are they daring Adiaha to blaze a new trail? Over the course of the play Udofia slowly discloses the intent of these ethereal conduits to a precolonial past — they communicate by speaking Ibibio and thumping their sticks — and this cat-and-mouse suspense adds heft to Adiaha’s agonizing struggle.

Widening the metaphorical context, adding phantasmal theatricality, compensates for weaknesses in the writing. As in Sojourners, Udofia gives us a complex female protagonist with a highly polished character arc. The figures around her, however, tend to be thinly drawn, handrails that guide the heroine along on her journey, from the bullheaded blusterer Disciple to the oh-so supportive bohemian, Kim. As the Shadows (Ekemini Ekpo, Janelle Grace, Patrice Jean-Baptiste, Chibuba Bloom Osuala, and Dayenne Walters) make themselves increasingly heard and seen, the script moves toward a powerful showdown that resonates on different levels — the spiritual, the mental, and the domestic — in a dimension that hovers somewhere between Western and African notions of self/soul.

Abigail C. Onwunali and Valyn Lyric Turner in The Huntington Theatre Company’s production of  The Grove. Photo: Marc J. Franklin

Director Awoye Timpo, who was at the helm of the Huntington Theatre Company staging of The Bluest Eye, brings an uneven touch to the HTC’s world premiere production of The Grove. The spats among the Ufot family members are rushed over: bitter clashes between feuding members, such as an estranged father and son, are opaque explosions. On the other hand, a tough/tender scene between Abigail C. Onwunali’s Adiaha and Patrice Johnson Chevannes’s Abasiama is shaped with a requisite care for its emotional ups-and-down, laughter giving way to exasperation. Chevannes’s matriarch is multilayered —  she’s beleaguered, but willing to pay the price for the restrictions. Onwunali’s Adiaha is convincingly hounded by forces she can’t understand, but the performer wallows in the character’s worry for too long. She hugs her anguish so closely that she has trouble supplying the exhilaration the final scene calls for. Other performances lean toward the one-note, particularly Joshua Olumide’s Disciple, a study in unmitigated stubbornness.

The Shadows are intriguingly “mythic” creations that deserve, like The Furies, more stage time, while set designer Jason Ardizzone-West ingeniously solves the problem of integrating physical and ethereal realms through the use of vertical steel rods to frame the revolving playing areas. Yet the steel sticks emit a contradictory icy vibe, a coldness that undercuts the image of the nurturing grove, a place where nature makes ancestral connection possible, a “spiritual” ecology that provides a radical contrast to the metallic force of our industrialized society.

Despite the presence of the Shadows, The Grove fits into the empowering “identity” genre. Channeling the past, Adiaha discovers the inner strength she needs to confront her parents. Unfortunately, systemic repression is not on the docket. It is a nice, feel-good finale, but, at this point in time, it doesn’t address the catastrophic challenges facing the world — the climate crisis, increasing odds for nuclear conflict, the resolute march of nationalism and fascism, and the diminishment, perhaps the extinction, of democracy here and abroad. The moment calls for plays that spotlight economic/political/ecological injustices, that explore collective solutions and pose visions of possibility, of communities coming together. These would be scripts that look at individuals who discover their value by collaborating with others toward a common goal. Dramas that examine those who are blocking beneficial actions or foresee the impossibility they will ever happen. These and other approaches, including political satire and the exploitation of documentary material, would offer fruitful alternatives that focus on issues of life, death, human rights, and the fragility of nature.

That said, in her curtain remarks at the end of the press night performance of The Grove, Udofia pointed out that it was important to present a play like this at this time. And the dramatist is right. Laws proscribing DEI and transgender rights are under fire by the troglodytic Trump administration, which is weaponizing government funding in order to regress the culture as well as society. A number of once supportive organizations — including leading universities and mega-corporations — are backsliding in fear. Paying homage to the value of diversity is no longer a self-admiring slam dunk — at least in some powerful liberal precincts. When allies waver, theater should cast shade on those who are aiding a segregationist, reactionary agenda by turning their backs on the cause of equality. I have a feeling the Shadows would agree.

Bill Marx is the editor-in-chief of The Arts Fuse. For over 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.