Review: Facing the Fallout from Youthful Choices in 'Her Portmanteau'

Two plays about the Nigerian-American immigrant experience are currently playing in repertory at New York Theatre Workshop: "Sojourners" (which I called "incisive" when I reviewed a production last year) and "Her Portmanteau."

Both are part of playwright Mfonsia Udofia's Ufot Family cycle of nine proposed plays (five have been completed so far; three have been performed). 

They are very different works. The first play, "Sojourners," follows Abasiama soon after she immigrates to Houston with husband in the 1970s. Pregnant and lonely, she needs to choose between living for her family — or do as Americans do and pursue her dream.

Her choice leads to the more intimate and conventional family drama, "Her Portmanteau," which takes place 36 years later in an apartment in Inwood, in upper Manhattan. It's her daughter's place — well, the place of one of her daughters. Her other, Iniabasi, abandoned by Abasiama (Jenny Jules) when she was small, has just stepped off a plane from Nigeria. She is haughty and bitter and exploding with rage. She wants a big house in which to raise her son, and everything else that she imagines her mother should have provided for her. 

Abasiama just wants her daughters together again, to be a family. 

If you've seen "Sojourners" recently, this work is a coda, a satisfying look at what came next. It's mostly a rehash of what happened after Abasiama and her daughter parted, but it's somehow flimsy on details, and it resolves too quickly and neatly. There's big emotion here, but it doesn't feel earned.

One of Udofia's great strengths is her finely-drawn characters; we understand right away who these three women are, even the underwritten American daughter, Adiagha. But we never get a strong enough sense of what is driving them and their inner lives remain a mystery. And unlike "Sojourners," which took a fresh look at the immigrant experience, "Her Portmanteau" feels much more like a standard American play about the relationship between a mother and her daughters, though there's not enough at stake to completely draw us in.

Yet I find myself looking forward to the next play in the cycle, because Abasiama carved such a deep impression in me after "Sojourners." She's an indelible American character — a woman who struggles, looks around, and lines up the ragged pieces of her new country so she can stitch together her own life.