creation stories and all the important importants

Mfoniso Udofia's new play creation stories and all the important importants is an Off-Broadway production by Lincoln Center Theater, presented under the LCT3 banner. LCT3 is the company's program for new artists, with an eye to bringing in new audiences, and its home is the Claire Tow Theater, a small house on the roof of the Vivian Beaumont Theater building. LCT prints the title entirely in lowercase, and this guide does the same.

The play is a world premiere and a limited engagement of six weeks. It is an original script, not an adaptation. LCT describes it as an intimate, mythic piece and a folktale of Udofia's own making, and Udofia herself uses the word fairy tale. She has said she has loved fairy tales since childhood and knew from the start that this one would be for a Black woman.

It is also a stylized autofiction. The main character is a Nigerian American playwright who teaches theater, and she shares Udofia's first name. Udofia has said that not every detail is true but that the framework is her own, including what an IVF cycle is like.

The play covers a single day in the life of a woman in midlife: a successful artist, a teacher, a daughter and a hoped-for mother. She wakes from a restless dream in which the Raffia, a dancing goddess figure covered in straw-like strands, appears. The day that follows is crowded. She is in the middle of another round of IVF after earlier attempts failed, she is stuck on her own writing, and she is racing against time and her body's limits.

She keeps up a cheerful front and even narrates her own day in the third person. There are upbeat phone calls with her mother and a tense visit to the doctor about blood-test results. At work she teaches a playwriting class built around a fictional Nigerian playwright, and her department chair calls the play she has chosen too unruly for the syllabus. When she sits down to write, she catches herself echoing Shakespeare and Beckett.

Her other selves keep arriving. Her younger self, the Little Girl, climbs out of a pile of dirty laundry and follows her through the day, and she may also stand for the daughter the woman hopes to have. Mr. Cornell, a rapping horse the woman invented as a child, turns up in orange braids and a hot-pink tracksuit to look after her. Alexa, her smart-speaker assistant, is voiced onstage too. The action drifts across time and space, from ancestors to artificial intelligence, and leans on music and ritual rather than a straight line of events.

Udofia has written a play about a playwright that comments on dramatic conventions while using them. Realism sits beside fantasy, and old mythology beside present-day technology. Mr. Cornell, for one, rejects the label deus ex machina and would rather be thought of as something closer to a Chekhov's pony, a joke that shows how openly the script talks about its own craft.

The play opens with elements of Nigerian cosmology. Udofia sees creation in the body, in art and in the cosmos as intertwined, and the script is about the cost of creating and the hard work of becoming. A second thread is the pressure to be exceptional, which she says Black women feel in particular, and the need to stop and rest. Her program note asks what happens when being exceptional is not enough to get a woman through.

Ardizzone-West's set is colorful and shaped like a crescent moon. Towers of blocks stand in for the apartment and the piles of laundry, and a curved path serves as the bed. Freer's projections play on a row of slanted screens at the back of the stage. Udofia wanted a real child, around 8 to 12, in the role of the Little Girl, and she says a future production might cast an adult instead.

As of October 2026, three actors share the stage. Abigail Onwunali plays The Grown Woman and The Raffia, Donnetta Lavinia Grays plays Alexa and Mr. Cornell, and Savannah Commodore plays The Little Girl. Justyce Taylor is the understudy for The Little Girl.

As of October 2026, Onwunali, who earned her MFA at the Yale School of Drama, is making her LCT3 debut. She won an Elliot Norton Award for playing Adiaha in Udofia's The Grove. In a 2026 Broadway revival directed by Debbie Allen, she and Commodore played mother and daughter; it was Commodore's Broadway debut. Grays is a playwright as well as an actor, and she has acted on Broadway in The Skin of Our Teeth. Woodard has directed Grays's play The House I Live In.

Udofia wrote the play on a commission that let her choose any subject. On March 23, 2026, it had a one-night reading in LCT's The Reading Series at the Claire Tow Theater, selected by Ayad Akhtar and directed by Rachel Chavkin. Each evening in the series is a reading of a new play followed by a conversation.

Lincoln Center Theater announced the production on June 23, 2026, as part of its 2026-27 season, with Woodard directing. The full cast and creative team followed on August 18, 2026. It is Udofia's LCT3 debut. Previews began on September 15, 2026, and the opening-night performance took place on October 1, 2026.