While a graduate student in acting at UC San Diego’s Department of Theatre and Dance, where her peers included budding playwrights Lauren Yee and Jeff Augustin, Ngozi Anyanwu recalled that she “learned stamina. I learned ferociousness.”
Since earning her master of fine arts 13 years ago, Anyanwu has relied on both attributes as an actor, a playwright and director. Take her new, two-character play “The Monsters.” She directed its Off Broadway world premiere in February at the Manhattan Theatre Club. Now she’s co-starring with Sullivan Jones in La Jolla Playhouse’s West Coast premiere of her play, a co-production with Berkeley Repertory Theatre.
“The Monsters” will open Tuesday, June 2, at La Jolla Playhouse’s Mandell Weiss Forum. (La Jolla Playhouse)
Actor-playwright Ngozi Anyanwu, a UC San Diego MFA graduate, will star in the West Coast premiere of her play “The Monsters” at La Jolla Playhouse. (La Jolla Playhouse)
Actor Sullivan Jones star in the West Coast premiere of Ngozi Anyanwu’s play “The Monsters” at La Jolla Playhouse. (La Jolla Playhouse)
Ngozi Anyanwu, left, and Sullivan Jones in the La Jolla Playhouse/Berkeley Rep co-production of “The Monsters.” (Kevin Berne)
Tamilla Woodard is the director of the La Jolla Playhouse/Berkeley Rep production of Ngozi Anyanwu’s play “The Monsters.” (Edward Winter)
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“The Monsters” will open Tuesday, June 2, at La Jolla Playhouse’s Mandell Weiss Forum. (La Jolla Playhouse)
A drama that calls for both literal wrestling and the interpersonal wrestling that comes with an estranged relationship in search of reconciliation, “The Monsters” tells the story of an aging MMA (mixed martial arts) fighter (Big, played by Jones) and the younger sister (Lil, Anyanwu’s role) who has appeared unexpectedly in his life.
“It’s taking a toll on us, and we are not 25 years old,” said the 43-year-old Anyanwu who’s a former personal trainer.
“I’m learning a lot about the sustainability of the show (which arrives in La Jolla following its Berkeley Rep run and will head to the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles next spring). “That’s the gig of the actor, to learn everything and focus on the task at hand. This is the third time I’ve been in something I’ve written. I learn about my play through an artist’s perspective, about how the play moves.
“I won’t say it’s easy. I’ve realized I’ve given myself quite a workout.”
“The Monsters” finds Lil not only wanting to mend her relationship with her big brother but to follow in his footsteps as an MMA fighter. It’s a physically taxing production for the actors. The technical team supporting them at La Jolla Playhouse includes choreographer Adesola Osakalumi, MMA consultant Sijara Eubanks and fight consultant Chelsea Pace.
Tamilla Woodard, who is directing the La Jolla production, credits that team with translating the narrative of the fighting.
“I’m about the tone and vision, and the tone and the feel of the play. There’s a lot of theatricality that I was very hungry to explore. It’s a play that requires a high level of spectacle that I love getting my hands on,” Woodard said. “I didn’t know anything about MMA so I knew I was going to have the opportunity to become a temporary expert as we often do in the theater, to dive into a world that we didn’t know before.”
Anyanwu’s own big brother Azzuna is a retired MMA fighter and, she said, the inspiration for the play.
“His DNA is so much in this,” Anyanwu said. “A lot of the spark of it was because of his experience as a bigger Black man. He’s a big guy, a strong guy. But he’s soft as well. I wanted to shed light on the duality of what people think and what he is, and on that (MMA) world, which is tough and intense, where some people, like Big, come from trauma, but there’s a heart to it.”
She recalled deciding to write “a fight play” almost a decade ago, but it wasn’t until, in a group of artists, she was encouraged to pursue the idea by Dennis Chambers, now associate artistic director of Two River Theatre in New Jersey. That company commissioned Anyanwu to write the play. The first draft was completed in 2024. Two River was a co-producer with the Manhattan Theatre Club of the New York world premiere.
It was Playhouse Artistic Producing Director Eric Keen-Louie who reached out to Anyanwu about bringing “The Monsters” to La Jolla.
Woodard, who is making her La Jolla Playhouse directorial debut, was drawn to what she called “the central questions” of this play: “How do we look at the ways that we sever ourselves from each other and the reasons, the fear that make us think we’re unworthy of another person’s attention or love? And how do we find ourselves back to each other?
“This is a piece where there are two people who find themselves coming back to each other. They have the ability to reflect each other’s heart and humanity,” Woodard said.
Formerly onstage herself and currently chair of the acting program at Yale Repertory Theatre, Woodard said she has “a deep reverence for what the actor can do and how hard this job is. I watch for the impulses. My job is to magnify, to make those bigger, or to say ‘A little bit less of that.’ I hope that the actors feel an ownership of their roles, that it has come out of the synthesis between them and the character.”
She describes her two actors in “The Monsters” as “temperamentally and absolutely perfect artists to work together in this space. Ngozi has a real sense of tempo and timing and agility with language. Sullivan, in his tall-drink-of-waterness, is so elegant in the way he moves.”
Anyanwu, Woodard said, “understands that her ceiling is not just high — it’s in the stratosphere.” She praises Sullivan’s “portrayal of a Black man who didn’t get to be a child. This story reclaims that for him. It’s actually his little sister holding him and saying ‘You can just be Joseph now.’ That childness, the wonder of the boy that gets left behind, is so present in Sullivan.”
To Anyanwu, there’s a third “character” in the play: time.
“It’s almost like a father and daughter in this play,” she said. “There’s a generational conflict, and there’s also the time that they (Big and Lil) have been apart.
“The play is so reliant on scene-partner chemistry, and it requires us to stay in physical shape and mental shape, too. It requires me to do some yoga in the morning, sleep all day, then be a monk, then do the show in the evening.”
A bonus, though, is returning to the scene of her education as a theater artist.
“UCSD gave me a place to put all that creativity, whether teachers liked it or not,” said Anyanwu. Coming back “feels like a homecoming, but it also feels quite natural.”
‘The Monsters’
When: Previews, Tuesday through Saturday. Opens next Sunday and runs through June 28. 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays; 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays; 1 and 7 p.m. Sundays
Where: La Jolla Playhouse’s Mandell Weiss Forum, 2910 La Jolla Village Drive, UCSD, La Jolla
Tickets: $30-$74
Phone: 858-550-1010
Online: lajollaplayhouse.org