Review: 'Sojourners': A Beautiful New Play About the American Dream

It's 1978 and Abasiama is a few days away from giving birth, yet she's still spending her evenings working at a grimy gas station in Houston, struggling to support her studies and those of her husband Ukpong. She left Nigeria after her parents arranged her marriage; now, away from the comforting help of her large family, she does what needs to be done, even though the baby is kicking her painfully in the ribs and her husband takes off without telling her, sometimes for days at a time.

Nigerian-American playwright Mfoniso Udofia's "Sojourners," now in its world premiere performance at The Playwright's Realm, is a story of the American Dream. But it's a realistic look at that dream — an incisive exploration of the choices immigrants must make to become Americans (not just to come to America). And it's something that Abasiama (Chinasa Ogbuagu) doesn't want, at least, not at first. She wants to go home to Nigeria, where her community lives in a compound and she doesn't have to struggle in isolation.

But her charming wastrel of a husband (Hubert Point-Du Jour) has been seduced by all the freedoms America offers. Away from war and the threat of war, he can just drive with friends for days at a time. He can drink. He can go to rallies and talk about politics and free love. And all without interference from the rules of his father and his society. He wants to stay in Houston.

What starts off seeming like a domestic drama eventually becomes something more, with the addition of Moxie, a local prostitute (a spunky Lakisha Michelle May) who's trying to get a legitimate job, and an emotionally un-tethered student/prophet/immigrant named Disciple Ufot (Chinaza Uche, sometimes too wild-eyed) who is trying to find divine inspiration as he writes about Nigeria. These two are lost souls — travelers who meet at Abasiama's gas station on their way to somewhere else. They cling to Abasiama as if she were a lifeboat. But unlike Moxie and Ufot, the steady Abasiama started off grounded; it is marriage to a stranger and having a child and being in Houston that have set her adrift. 

The spinning in place of the characters is matched by Jason Sherwood's clever, spinning set — each side of the square is a different place (a living room, a hospital room, the gas station, the prophet's bedroom), and they each open into the other, like a puzzle box. 

Director Ed Sylvanus Iskandar has staged this deeply beautiful, complex new play with both compassion and humor. He's aided by the sharp sound design of Jeremy S. Bloom, whose period music flows from room to room. 

"Sojourners" is the first in a proposed nine-work play cycle. By itself, it's a rich piece, looking at how America changes the people who come here, for better and for worse.