Magic’s ‘Sojourners’ looks at Nigerian immigrant experience

Standing by the hospital bedside of a new mother he barely knows, the visitor fixes her with an intently focused look.

An encounter that might otherwise seem peculiar if not a little menacing strikes an intrinsic emotional chord in “Sojourners,” a heartfelt and ardently acted play about Nigerian immigrants living in Houston in the late 1970s.

Seen at a Tuesday, April 19, media preview, this Magic Theatre West Coast premiere explores the force fields of aspiration and assimilation, loneliness and self-assertion that spark and crackle through the three Nigerian characters and one native Texan.

Even as she addresses various broad-brush issues about the immigrant experience — a topic with plenty of currency in this fractious election year — playwright Mfoniso Udofia roots them in well-drawn and authentic characters.

Pregnant by her charming but irresponsible husband Ukpong (a vibrant Jarrod Smith), Ama regards him with wary hopefulness as she shuttles from college to her night job at a gas station food kiosk and back to the couple’s apartment.

The young prostitute Moxie (Jamella Cross, in a sassy but tentative performance) saunters up to apply for a job at the Fiesta, striking up a friendship with Ama after the Nigerian woman helps her with the application.

In a brief spoken extract, he describes how Nigeria’s “talented tenth,” educated abroad, will ultimately help their country “rise and take their place on the global stage.”

Udofia is keenly tuned to the ways in which language captures and embodies those things — the daunting pages of college textbooks, the struggle to fine-tune the American pronunciation of a word, a rush of untranslated Ibidio that taps the characters into the wellspring of family and home.

Soundly directed by Ryan Guzzo Purcell, with a key contribution from York Kennedy’s attentive lighting, “Sojourners” moves at a patient but accretive pace.

[...] when Ama steps into a pool of light at the end of the evening, eyes brimming with the fullness of what she’s just decided, the audience pulls forward with her, wanting and needing to know where she’s headed next.