I’d be doing Round House Theatre’s stirring new production of Mfoniso Udofia’s stranger-in-a-strange land drama, Sojourners, no favors by telling you the play is but the first entry in Udofia’s nine-part saga surveying the experiences of a family of Nigerian immigrants in the United States. That makes it sound like the kind of bone-dry academic thesis that one of Sojourners’ characters—a pious, committed student named Disciple (Kambi Gathesha)—is working on as he’s introduced. But despite Udofia’s August Wilson-like ambition to work on a grand scale, this first chapter in what she’s called The Ufot Cycle is intimate and insightful on its own modest terms. (Three of the other Ufot plays have already received full productions at various theaters nationwide, and next month a coalition of Boston-based companies will begin staging all nine entries over a two-year period.)

Set in Houston in 1978, Sojourners follows the trials of Abasiama (Billie Krishawn)—“Ama” to her friends—a tough, smart, pregnant young woman who works at a gas station to support her deadbeat husband, Ukpong (Opa Adeyemo). He’s a full-time student who’s been lured away from campus by the temptations of records (Motown, early Prince) and beer (Guinness, mostly). The couple’s marriage was arranged by their fathers, and their intentions are to return to Nigeria after earning their degrees in America. 

As the evening opens, Ukpong is starry-eyed after attending a political rally in lieu of showing up for class. Ama, however, gets a more earthbound dose of the American dream during her graveyard shift, when Moxie (Renea S. Brown), a working girl who already bears the physical and psychological scars of her high-risk profession, asks for—well, demands—Ama’s help filling out a job application. That Ama’s command of written English far surpasses that of the native Texan with whom she’ll form an unlikely bond of mutual protection is the kind of observation that Udofia, herself the daughter of Nigerian immigrants, says she wrote the play to make. (Like other Americans, Moxie assumes that Ama hails from “the jungle.”) 

Moxie isn’t the only person who’s drawn to Ama’s innate goodness and strength—Disciple (Kambi Gathesha) also inserts himself into Ama’s already-full-to-bursting life, believing that it must be God’s will that he ran out of gas near a “petrol station” staffed by a woman who speaks the same dialect he does. (Udofia pointed out in a 2017 New York Times profile that 500 languages are spoken in Nigeria.) Cursed with a husband who lacks focus and ambition, Ama now finds herself fending off a would-be suitor who has arguably too much of both. If director Valerie Curtis–Newton’s sturdy production has a flaw, it’s that the early scenes of Disciple alone in his room, surrounded by discarded wads of balled-up paper, feel a bit cartoonish in their depiction of the struggle of writing, and that their conflation of the creative struggle with that of assimilation or at least survival in an often-hostile foreign land devalues both experiences somehow. Once Disciple finds his way to Ama’s bulletproof-glass booth stocked with Snickers bars (one Yankee temptation to which Ama shall succumb) and Shiner Bock—the most evocative of the environments scenic designer Paige Hathaway has placed upon a revolving set—this weakness falls away.

Everyone in the cast Curtis-Newton has marshaled is compelling, but Krishawn’s Ama is its absorbing anchor. She resists the temptation to make Ama saintly in her suffering, showing us instead the terrible cost that Ama’s forced maturity exacts from her. It’s a truly accomplished and dimensional performance, one that leaves us yearning to know what will befall Ama and her baby daughter next. We’re fortunate that Udofia already knows.

Sojourners, by Mfoniso Udofia and directed by Valerie Curtis-Newton runs through Oct. 6 at Round House Theatre. Fall Arts Guide Rating: 4 out of 5 stars. roundhousetheatre.org. $50–$93.