Celebrating Writers Illuminating The Future Of American Theater

“What do you do for joy?”

Mfoniso Udofia was a student at Wellesley College, firmly convinced she was on the lawyer track, when an insightful dean posed that simple, yet enlightening, question. And Udofia’s universe shifted in a colossal way.

“That question changed everything,” says the playwright whose plays like Sojourners, runboyrun, Her Portmanteau and In Old Age have been developed and performed throughout the United States. “I believe the subtext was: What if the thing that brings you joy could also be your career?” She started singing, then acting, then writing. “Just saying ‘yes’ to what felt right,” says Udofia.

Although the seed was planted, it still took time to discover she had to be an artist. “Even after writing my first play, the Grove, I didn’t fully claim the title of “writer,” says Udofia who graduated in 2009, in the midst of the Great Recession, and was terrified of not going to law school nor choosing a “traditional” career, especially when she had no money nor idea how to make this life work. “It took years. I was doing the work long before I ever let myself say, I’m a writer. The realization wasn’t a lightning bolt—it was a slow burn.”

While Udofia’s entry into playwriting was “a slow burn,” her artistry caught fire. A first-generation Nigerian-American storyteller and educator, her plays have been seen at New York Theatre Workshop, American Conservatory Theater, Playwrights Realm, Magic Theater, National Black Theatre, The Huntington, Round House Theatre, Strand Theater, and Boston Court. She has written for the shows 13 Reasons Why, A League of Their Own, Pachinko, Little America and Lessons in Chemistry. She has also developed films for HBO, Legendary, and Amazon.

Most recently, Udofia—along with acclaimed playwright Christina Anderson—received the 2024 Steinberg Playwright Award. Presented by the Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust, each year the “Mimi” Awards are given to early and mid-career playwrights with compelling voices who display artistic excellence and illuminate American theater.

Devoted to nurturing playwrights, the trust has given over $100 million to theater organizations, with a particular focus on new play commissions, development, and production. “The Steinberg Trust is dedicated to shining a light on distinctive and powerful voices, and to investing in the future of American playwriting,” said Steinberg trustee Carole Krumland who went on to add that Anderson and Udofia are “two brilliant playwrights whose transcendent and transformative work will continue to inspire and inform the future of this art form.”

For Anderson, a prolific playwright whose work has been performed at The Acting Company, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Goodman Theatre, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Geva Theatre, Portland Center Stage, Baltimore Center Stage, Kansas City Repertory Theatre and Yale Repertory Theatre, the award has been seismic.

“In these uncertain times, the Steinberg Playwright Award is a life-changing gift of freedom and artistic stillness to create and dream,” said Anderson. In addition to writing plays like the Ripple, the Wave That Carried Me Home, How to Catch Creation, Man in Love, Good Goods, the Ashes Under Gait City, Hollow Roots, Blacktop Sky, and pen/man/ship, Anderson is also a gifted TV writer and screenwriter who produces hip hop instrumentals.

And now, more than ever, the “Mimi” Awards seem particularly vital. Especially when it’s harder to be an artist. “These awards ensure that those who document our humanity—who help us make sense of it, who remind us, and call us to our greater selves—can afford to keep doing so,” says Mfoniso. “Security and certainty are rarely reliable, but those elements feel especially tenuous now,” shares Anderson. “This award is a stable force that helps an artist stay the course.”

As Mfoniso observes, the world needs storytellers. “Theater artists hold a mirror to the world, especially in the most topsy-turvy of times. And we are in the midst of some of the strangest—and potentially most dangerous—moments in history,” she says. “As certain sectors of our community struggle to negotiate what “the truth” actually is, as cruelty becomes the currency du jour, and as portions of society willfully forget that our humanity is something to be tendered and cultivated—instead of nurturing empathy, a skill and ultimate goal, not a weakness—artists become both the memory and the chroniclers of pathways forward.”

Jeryl Brunner: Can you share when you got word that you won the Mimi Steinberg award?

Mfoniso Udofia: I was actually out of the country with my partner and some friends when I got the email. It was from Deb [Deborah] Martin, who introduced herself as the Administrative Director of the Harold and Mimi Steinberg Trust, asking if I had five to ten minutes to talk. My stomach dropped—in the best way—because you don’t get emails like that unless they’re really good.

My partner saw my face as we stood in this overseas clothing store, and I just froze. I was cycling through every emotion—excitement, overwhelm, absolute joy—while also trying to steady myself. But I replied immediately because, yes, I had 5–10 minutes. In fact, I had 30. I had an hour. I had the whole day.Later that day, Deb and I got on the phone, and she told me the news. After I hung up, I screamed, fully leaning into the moment and letting the feeling take over.

Christina Anderson: When I received the call, I thought it was an invitation to be on the selection panel—which I was super excited to say yes to. It never occurred to me that I may have won anything. Deborah was like, “the panel has already convened, and they’ve selected you!” I stood in my living room, speechless.

Brunner: How will this award help you continue to be an artist?

Anderson: It provides the breathing room to explore dream projects. I’ve already written a play that I don’t think I would’ve written before receiving this award. I’ve carried the idea for almost ten years. But there’s always this quiet pressure to write something marketable and fairly accessible. So, I’d gravitate towards other ideas in that lane. But this most recent play is a true passion project. This award ushers in what I hope to be a new phase in my writing.

Udofia: Theater—God bless it—is my heart, but it does not always pay well. I’m currently mounting all nine plays of my Ufot Cycle in the Boston area over the next two years. It’s a huge undertaking, and I feel incredibly blessed to have productions happening. But practically speaking? This money will help me sustain. It gives me breathing room to focus on the work.

Brunner: What is some of the best writing advice you have received?

Anderson: Paula Vogel told me, “Be your own adjective.” It’s maverick speak, and I love it. It’s just an awesome piece of advice because there’s freedom in it and power and strength.

A Christina Anderson play is its own adventure. It’s inspired by the things that inspires me. I define what’s lifted up. Who’s lifted up. My theatrical sensibility is filled with curiosity, poetry, possibility, and I try to instill that vision into each play I write. That sensibility also nourishes me to write the next one, and the next one, and the next.

Brunner: Mfoniso, in the New York Times, you said that you are determined to show the nuances of African immigrant experiences—“that the continent isn’t tragic, and its people aren’t broken.” Can you share more?

Udofia: I often teach from Binyavanga Wainaina’s How to Write About Africa, a satirical takedown of how the continent is often depicted in literature. The first time I read it, I laughed—and then realized I was bleeding. Because so much of what I had seen followed that same tired script.

I’m not afraid to write about pain—several of my plays tackle difficult themes—but I’m also invested in joy. In laughter. In eros, when sparks fly between two people and a whole new world begins. In healing, when trauma doesn’t remain the defining factor in a character’s life. I’m drawn to the African everyman—the Nigerian immigrant whose struggles, triumphs, and everyday moments are deeply human. The nuances might be different, but the core of the story? It’s something we all recognize.

Brunner: Christina, can you talk more about the book you are working on that explores playwriting as an accessible artistic life practice?

Anderson: Being a Black woman writing the type of plays that I write, it’s been a tricky journey navigating people’s assumptions and expectations of how my stories should move and breathe on stage. I’m definitely not inventing the wheel, but I am stretching my ideas about how to move a story forward, how to capture and manipulate time on stage, how do we explore an immense history in an intimate theatrical setting. I braid the speculative and evidential into the lives of my characters to hopefully ignite conversation at a molecular level, a nuance level. And I’m also really committed to telling a good story. Can we see ourselves and see the world in these plays, on this stage.

My plays, my playwriting practice is my activism that has made me a lifelong scholar. I’m writing a book that will explore this way of writing and, again, hopefully, encourages others to consider writing plays for their communities, their families, their circles, themselves.