Review: A Bumpy Return to Nigeria for ‘The Homecoming Queen’

“Can I touch you?” he asks, and an agonizing eternity of indecision fills the gap before she answers, “Yes.”

She is Kelechi, who left her native Nigeria for the United States at 15 and has only just returned, at 30, to visit her ailing father. In between she wrote a best-selling novel that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

He is Obina, a successful London-trained banker who was once her family’s houseboy.

The scene in which an ambitious woman finally melts for a steady man who has always loved her is a staple of romantic comedy, if not so much of real life. But as refracted through the lens of the African diaspora in Ngozi Anyanwu’s “The Homecoming Queen,” which opened on Monday at the Atlantic Theater Company’s Stage 2, it becomes something fresh and complex. Like the play, this scene wrings all the pleasure possible out of its familiar tropes even as it revamps their meaning entirely.

Ms. Anyanwu achieves this effect partly through a layering of stories, some taking place now, some in the past and some in scenes drawn from Kelechi’s apparently autobiographical novel. By the time she and Obina finally do touch, we know a great deal about their history — a terrible one that was part of the reason Kelechi, and probably Obina, left Nigeria in the first place.

That they have returned makes “The Homecoming Queen” appear, at first, to be a comedy of deracination. Kelechi is so thoroughly Americanized that when she arrives at her family’s compound she barely recognizes the folkways or even the Igbo words of her youth. A mouthy “rough gal” — as her father, Godwin, calls her — she can’t help shooing away the interfering aunties who descend upon her to paw through her luggage any more than she can help mocking her father’s grandiosity. (“Seriously, Dad, is the ‘Coming to America’ chair necessary?”) Cultural appropriation, it seems, is a two-way street.

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You may think from this opening that you know how the rest of the story will go: Kelechi’s alienation will gradually be replaced by a sense of belonging. But the expected trajectory is not the path “The Homecoming Queen” takes. For one thing, as we learn, Kelechi was not very happy even in the States. Love affairs failed, and the success of her novel, “De Panta, De Tiger and De Bird,” created too much expectation for a follow-up hit. Her trip home, intended in part to inspire her writing, derails her further. Only with the help of her “anxious pills” (as Beatrice, her father’s young housegirl, calls them) does she stave off a breakdown, and then only temporarily.

I don’t want to spoil the surprise of how these four main characters — Kelechi (Mfoniso Udofia), Obina (Segun Akande), Godwin (Oberon K. A. Adjepong) and Beatrice (Mirirai Sithole) — are connected beneath the play’s surface. But if the plot is compelling, in some ways echoing Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel “Americanah,” it is also sometimes murky; you have to listen hard for the clues to what has happened and also be patient with unmarked detours into flashbacks and fictions. In contrast, too many of the conventionally narrative scenes, especially between Kelechi and Godwin, repeat the same arc, moving predictably from pleasantry to snark to umbrage to apology. They deliver no new emotional information even if they do deliver delight.

The staging by Awoye Timpo, on a set by Yu-Hsuan Chen that surrounds the audience, could do a better job of ameliorating that problem by differentiating and contouring the material. On the other hand, Ms. Timpo’s work with the principals (who are accompanied by a delightful four-woman chorus playing those gossipy aunties and hymn-singing elders) is exemplary. As Beatrice, Ms. Sithole amply fulfills Kelechi’s description of her as one of those people who, though quiet, “think loud”; it’s hard not to watch her constantly watching.

I appreciated, too, that the characters’ emotions are not rushed into place as if on a conveyor belt, which often happens in shortish plays. (This one is an hour and 45 minutes.) Though the scene in which Obina asks if he can touch Kelechi appears in the script with no stage direction, the director has encouraged Ms. Udofia and Mr. Akande to take all the time they need. The result is a marvelous three-act opera in the blank space between question and answer.

Ms. Sithole and Ms. Udofia, who is also a playwright, are becoming familiar figures in the recent flowering of diasporic African plays in New York, most of them written by women. Last year, Ms. Sithole appeared in Jocelyn Bioh’s hilarious “School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play” (set in Ghana); Ms. Udofia’s powerful dramas “Sojourners” and “Her Portmanteau” (about Nigerians living in Texas and New York) ran in repertory at New York Theater Workshop. Danai Gurira’s “Eclipsed” (which takes place in Liberia during its civil wars) and “Familiar” (a comedy about Zimbabwean immigrants in Minnesota) were both seen here in 2016.

Not much unites these plays; it’s a large continent. But all of them more or less touch on the way American influence is perceived and absorbed by Africans. (Even in “Eclipsed,” the enslaved “wives” of the Liberian warlords read a biography of Bill Clinton — as a romance novel.) If “The Homecoming Queen” is ultimately less political, and more personal, than the others, it is not less funny than the comedies nor less despairing than the dramas.

“I wanted to write about culpability and revenge,” Ms. Anyanwu explains in a preface to the text, “but this came instead.” In its happy but deliberately unreal ending, her play suggests that for some traumatized people there’s no place like home — not even home itself.