In Photo: Lorraine Victoria Kanyike, Patrice Jean-Baptiste Photo by: Maggie Hall Photography
Presented by Central Square Theater with the Front Porch Arts Collective
By Mfoniso Udofia
Directed by Tasia A. Jones
Dramaturgy by Elijah Estolano Punzal
Original music and sound design by Eduardo M Ramirez
Dialect coaching by Bibi Mama
Featuring Patrice Jean-Baptiste, Jade A Guerra, Lorraine Victoria Kanyike
March 27 – April 20, 2025
Central Square Theater
450 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02139
Online playbill
Critique by Kitty Drexel
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – Central Square Theater and The Front Porch Arts Collective present the fourth play in Boston’s Ufot Family Cycle, Her Portmanteau by Mfoniso Udofia. Many elements recommend this play, including great acting and moving storytelling. Additionally, while it is part of the Ufot Cycle, it stands alone as a tribute to a Massachusetts family trying to love each other despite intergenerational trauma, betrayal, and culture shock.
In Her Portmanteau, the American Ufot family reconnects with the Nigerian Ekpoyong family. Adiaha Ufot (Lorraine Victoria Kanyike) welcomes half-sister Iniabasi Ekpeyong (Jade A Guerra) to her New York apartment. It is winter, and Iniabasi has neither the coat nor footwear for the frigid weather. Adiaga offers Iniabasi a sweater and woollen socks, but Iniabasi refuses them. Iniabasi had to wait over an hour at JFK Airport. She was supposed to land in Boston. Their mother, Abasiama (Patrice Jean-Baptiste), was supposed to pick Iniabasi up so they could stay at the family house in Worcester. No one looks like their photos. Iniabasi doesn’t know why things have changed or who to trust.
Over an afternoon of discomforting accusations and bald truths, Iniabasi and Adiaha finally receive answers from their mother, Abasiama. Her Portmanteau asks its characters to reinterpret family lore with a more holistic, worldly interpretation of what it means to love. It asks its audience to trust that strong, compassionate women torn apart by circumstances will mend their family with enough patience. Strong women may not always do what they want to, but they will do what they have to.
Dictionary.com defines kinkeeping as the emotional and physical labor of maintaining and enhancing family relationships. Kinkeeping includes but is not limited to actions such as organizing social events (family reunions, Shabbat dinner, etc.), remembering birthdays, celebrating anniversaries, sending gifts, etc. Frequently, but not always, this work is performed by cis women on behalf of the entire family unit. In cultures where this work is traditionally done only by women, family lore is lost when women can’t or aren’t available to do this valuable family community work. In Her Portmanteau, we learn that Iniabasi was raised by her father, Ukpong Ekpeyong, on their compound in Nigeria. We learn through the play that Iniabasi, Abasiama, and Adiaha are missing decades of family history because they have been apart for so long. They learn what it is to be a blended family through the retelling of stories, singing of songs, and sharing of large and small home traditions.
Each of the plays in the Ufot Family Cycle is produced and performed with great care. Her Portmanteau is equally excellent due to the continuation of casting through the cycle as well as thoughtful, informed casting of immense talent in general. Local actor Jean-Baptiste understudied Abasiama in The Grove, so she has a layered approach to Abasiama in Her Portmanteau. In this play, she interprets her role with compassion for the challenges Abasiama faces and the hard journey Abasiama has navigated as a young mother whose baby was taken from her and as a successful academic in a male-dominated field.
Kanyike and Guerra are new to the cycle. Kanyike brings fresh interpretations to the role of Adiaha; this character was plagued by spirits of her ancestors in The Grove. In Her Portmanteau, we see who Adiaha is as a daughter free from the encumbrance of her past or the anxieties of her present. Kanyike gives Adiaha a well of resilience to stomach her family’s issues and an understated sense of humor. Adiaha will control what she can control and wait out what she can’t.
Guerra is direct and unflinching as Iniabasi. This a woman who has loved and lost so many times that she will protect what she still has until she dies. We watch Guerra melt down her walls for her son on the phone. Guerra spins on a dime to put those walls back up when she senses a potential threat. Iniabasi isn’t a hard woman; she is a healing woman.
Characters Abasiama (Jean-Baptiste) and Iniabasi (Jade A Guerra) speak in English and the Southeastern-Nigerian dialect Ibibio throughout the play. Thanks to the direction of Jones and dialect coaching by Bibi Mama, the gist of those sections of Her Portmanteau is easy to comprehend even if audiences can’t translate every word.
At the beginning of the play, Iniabasi calls home from an airport payphone and speaks to the person on the other end in Ibibio. We can tell from Iniabasi’s posture and affectionate tone that she speaks to a young child. Patrons who’ve known a rambunctious six-year-old will empathize with Iniabasi’s attempts to parent that kid over the phone with loving but firm boundaries. Later, Iniabasi and Abasiama argued in Ibibio. The fraught relationship between moms and daughters who struggle to understand each other is universal: Their voices get loud; they stand tall, but their shoulders hunch. One doesn’t have to speak Ibibio to recognize bickering weighted with broken expectations and disappointment.
One of the thoughtful ways Central Square Theater limits its climate change footprint is by dispersing condensed programs to its audience members. CST’s full-length program with cast and crew bios, pretty pictures, dramaturg’s articles, and a list of donor credits is available online. It is a trend we hope continues to expand amongst theatre companies, great and small.
In Photo: Jade A. Guerra
Photo by: Maggie Hall Photography
Since CST’s print program is reduced, space is at a premium. Only the most important production information, including handy QR codes for the online playbill, is viewable in the print version. So, the dramaturgical blurb by Elijah Estolano Punzal on the back of the program about the role of the “adiaha” in Nigerian family hierarchy becomes especially significant to a patron attending Her Portmanteau. The blurb points to two important articles in the mobile program (found after the cast and crew bios). CST and The Porch wouldn’t devote space to the blurb if Punzal’s writing weren’t otherwise important.
Online, Punzal lays out all the necessary information a patron must understand about the production as a standalone story as well as a story within the Ufot Family Cycle. Punzal does this without spoilers while assuming audiences can understand the inherent differences between Nigerian, Nigerian-American, and North American cultural differences. It’s refreshing to be given the benefit of the doubt.
Additionally, Punzal communicates sophisticated, abstract concepts in simple terms that a majority of readers will understand. Siya’s dramaturgy enables patrons who haven’t seen the other plays in the Ufot cycle (including runboyrun, which had a two-date engagement for limited audiences in mid-March with GBH) to embrace all of the nuances of Her Portmanteau. These aren’t easy feats, and Punzal accomplishes them with aplomb stemming from skillful writing and, hopefully, appropriate compensation*.
Among other things, Punzal’s dramaturgy asks us – nay, forces us – to reconcile the fates of immigrant lives in these disturbing times of political upheaval and fascist dismantling of democratic precedent. Our government has awarded multibillion-dollar contracts to private prisons so ICE can round up immigrants anywhere and everywhere. ICE can’t find illegal immigrants to detain, so they are creating them by invalidating legal educational and work visas and green cards. It is seeking out protestors – who legally have the right to protest as U.S. residents- and detaining them as revenge for speaking against fascism. The cruelty is the point.
Iniabasi Ekpeyong, if she were a real person, would be a legal U.S. resident. The character was born in Houston, TX, and spent most of her life in Nigeria. Regardless, Iniabasi would be entitled to a U.S. passport and residence in any of our 50 states as long as she had the paperwork. Thanks to the tireless efforts of her family, she does. The dismantling of our government currently makes filing paperwork to ensure migrants receive due process impossible. There aren’t the employees to process it. If Her Portmanteau were to occur now, Iniabasi would be fucked. ICE would find her, detain her for months (therefore validating the billions the government has spent on private prison contracts), and ship her to Africa without due process or the legal representation she is entitled to. Unrest assured, beloved matriarch Abasiama Ufot, a legal resident who arrived in Houston in 1978 on an education visa, would face similar civil violations.
Apropos of nothing, the remote-controlled candles designed by prop designer Julia Wonkka were very clever. I didn’t know candles could do that!
The sound design by Arshan Gailus sounded completely natural. One sequence requires a cell phone to be passed between Adiaha and Abasiama. We hear the voice of Abasiama’s husband, Disciple, rant angrily into the phone about some unknown issue. At our performance, the prop phone screen was black, which meant the yelling voice was either a recording on the phone or piped in from a room speaker we couldn’t detect. Either way, it sounded like the actors took a real call. It was a small, functional detail that heightened the show’s realism.
In these times when tariffs are manly and empathy is a sin, Her Portmanteau asks audiences for compassion. The United States was colonized by immigrants. It was industrialized by immigrants. It is fed, clothed, educated, cleaned, entertained, and healed by immigrants. Their lives are valuable.
*Please tip your barstaff, stage managers, and dramaturgs.
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