At the end of “Sojourners,” the first play of Mfoniso Udofia’s nine-play Ufot Family Cycle, matriarch and central character Abasiama sends her newborn daughter and husband back to their home country of Nigeria. She decides to forge her path in America on her own — a journey audiences follow throughout the rest of the cycle, which includes a new husband and three children from that second marriage.

But in “Her Portmanteau,” Abasiama’s monumental decision collides with her new life as her first “eldest” daughter, Iniabasi, returns to the United States in search of answers and connection with her mother and her half-sister, Adiaha — Abasiama’s second “eldest” daughter, and the main character of the cycle’s second play, “The Grove.”

At the heart of “Her Portmanteau” is a desire for connection across geographic, cultural and emotional lines, and for answers to long-held questions.

“What is legacy?” playwright Udofia said on GBH’s Under the Radar. “What is lineage? What are culture shifts when you have your baby returning 36 years later to go, ‘Hey, Mom, what happened?’”

Udofia said even the use of the Nigerian language Ibibio is essential to that central theme, with the language used to showcase both inclusion and exclusion between characters.

“I was really interested in power and language,” Udofia said. “Iniabasi is walking into this situation speaking English, but she’s making choices based on some assumptions on how she is being heard. So she understands that Abasiama hears the language and, I think, is making an assumption that Adiaha does not. And so language is used as a way to ice a party out. Abasiama will use language as a way to connect, and then you’ll also watch as she, in moments of rupture, she’ll revert to English, because she also is discomfited. So yes, in this play, more than any of my others, language itself is a character, and marking the way it’s used lets you know a lot about the emotional state of the person.”

The language was a particular challenge to Jade A. Guerra, the actress playing Iniabasi. Guerra said preparing for this role included plenty of assistance from experts.

“There is a lot of help involved in terms of getting a lot of the cultural references, because I am not Nigerian,” Guerra said. “Learning parts of the language, because until I read this play, I did not know Ibibio even existed, really. So it’s coming at it completely from the outside but being really excited about gaining all this knowledge about this culture that I haven’t been a part of. So it’s really just reading a lot, studying a lot, practicing a lot of the tone, the language, the dialect.”

Ultimately, Udofia said, “Her Portmanteau” is not only about the figurative baggage families of immigrants carry as they try to make a life in a new country, but also about acknowledging the complexities within our families and how to move forward together.

“How do you build in this country when you don’t have access to resource, when there are real complications, when it comes to the stability of household, and how to dream forward when it doesn’t feel as if you’ve got enough inside your toolkit to pave a way?” Udofia asks. “What I’m hoping when people see [“Her Portmanteau] is, yes, a little bit of that frustration, but then also seeing and feeling what it is to try to do a little bit better than yesterday and know that if you keep doing that, the days do get better.”

Central Square Theater and Front Porch Collective’s production of“Her Portmanteau” premiers on March 27. Learn more at centralsquaretheater.org .

Guests

  • Mfoniso Udofia  , award-winning playwright and the creator of the Ufot Family Cycle.
  • Jade A. Guerra , actress playing Iniabasi, Abasiama Ufot’s eldest daughter, in “Her Portmanteau.”