After graduating from San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre in 2009, Mfoniso Udofia ’06 moved to New York City, secured an agent, and began auditioning for plays and films. It was the stuff her burgeoning dreams were made of—except she couldn’t get a part. Slowly, she began to realize what no one else would say out loud: She wasn’t “the right type” of black. “You walk into stories you think you know and have occupied, and realize the room says you don’t know them,” she explains. Mfoniso eventually booked roles in a play and an independent film, but her agent eventually dropped her, saying, “You are really talented, but we don’t know what to do with you right now.” After the independent film wrapped, something more important happened: She began writing her own roles.
She studied political science at Wellesley and planned to apply to law school, but then, as a junior, she read Ntozake Shange’s 1975 play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf. “I knew then, this is my life, this is what I want to do,” she says. She became the black arts chair of Ethos and put on a full production of Shange’s play, and a few others, not yet understanding that it was the storytelling component she loved most.
After she finished The Grove in 2011, she realized she’d lost the desire to act, and that she had more to tell. She has since written dozens of plays, all of them about Nigerian characters. As Mfoniso kept writing—and being awarded prestigious residencies to facilitate that process—one of her primary goals became locating Africans in America with authenticity and honesty. “I wanted to disrupt a little bit of the fabric of the American theater,” she explains. She was tired of Africa being dealt with as a faraway thing to be gazed at, as if it were a specimen in a Petri dish.