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most of us are George Street Playhouse– “Her Portmanteau” by Mfoniso Udofia – will hear Nigeria’s Ibibio language for the first time.

The George Street Company has two experts to make sure we hear it right.

“Her Portmanteau,” directed by Laiona Michelle, will run October 11-30 at the New Brunswick Center for the Performing Arts. This is one of nine expected loops in which Udofia presents the experience of Abasiama Ufot, a Nigerian-born woman who immigrated to the United States.

Abasiama has two daughters – Iniabasi Ekpeyong, from a failed marriage in Nigeria, and Adiaha Ufot, from a long-standing but troubled marriage in the United States. In the show, Iniabasi has just arrived in New York where she believes she and her young son Kufre, who is still in Nigeria, will be living with Abasiama in Massachusetts.

The encounters between these women, which take place mostly in Adiaha’s small New York apartment, are filled with tension, some specific to the immigrant experience, and some caused by situations that can affect families anywhere.

In the first line of the play, Iniabasi, who just got off the plane at JFK, is calling her son’s caregiver in Nigeria: “Uwem, mmeyem ita? I know? ye Kufre” – “Uwem, I think Talk to Kufre.”

In a way that is not unique to the show, this line and other occasional Ibibio dialogue are not translated for the audience to be informed, if not literal statements obtained from the context of the scene.

None of the actors featured in “Her Portmando” speak Ibibio, one of hundreds of languages ​​and dialects spoken in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country.

Cast of “Her Portmanteau” – (LR) Jennean Farmer, Shannon Harris and Mattilyn Rochester Kravitz

The task of instructing players to speak the correct language fell to Ebbe Bassey, a Bronx-born actress, writer and producer who grew up in Nigeria.

Brazil said she was involved in the project when she attended the reading of Udofia’s play and realized that she and the playwright had roots in the same region of Nigeria. Since then, she has worked with any theater company that puts on a Udofia play.

“My job,” Bassey said, “is to get the actors to pronounce it correctly so that the people in the audience who can understand the lines don’t say, ‘That’s not a native speaker.'”

That’s no easy task, she said, because like every language, Ibibio has its own unique characteristics, some of which are unknown in English.

“A particular challenge for actors is tone,” Bassey said. “One word can mean two or three different things. I want them to be as close to the correct inflection as possible so they don’t say the opposite of what they’re trying to say.”

Bassey says she uses music to get the actors to adapt to Ibibio’s rhythmic nature, which is also a feature outside of English.

In addition, she says, “there are certain sounds in Ibibio that don’t exist in English, and that involves the formation of the mouth and the placement of the tongue.” For example, Ibibio uses combinations of consonants that don’t appear in English, and, she says, “American People are used to blasting the letter ‘t’.” At Ibibio, we don’t; the ‘t’ stops at the top of the mouth. “

This language issue is subtle in “Her Portmando,” in part because one character, Iniabasi, has spent her entire life in Nigeria until now. Another, Abasiama, has spent a long time in both Nigeria and the United States; the third, Adiaha, has been living in the United States. These differences can affect the way they speak, especially their English accent.

Maggie Surovell is an actor, writer, director, and has been a dialect coach since 2005, helping actors improve their accents. Sulowell said she worked with the cast to study three elements of Ibibio that affect accent: “playful” musicality, muscularity (“every accent has a set of muscles you use when you speak”), and the pronunciation of words.

“I’m working with actors on how to bring the salient features of language into accents,” Surovell said.

It means different for each character, she explained. Iniabasi is fresh from Nigeria and has the heaviest accent. Abasiama has lived in the United States for decades and has a less pronounced accent. For example, she doesn’t “tap” certain “r”s — meaning she doesn’t pronounce it by touching her tongue to the ridge on the roof of her mouth — which Iniabasi does.

“Adiaha really doesn’t have an Ibibio accent,” Soruvell said. “She’s American, speaks only English, and has a very subtle Ibio influence.”

Besides making the language sound real, why are these distinctions important?

Soruvell says the difference in speech helps bring to life the nature of the relationships between these women:

“We want the audience to feel the distance between them. The accent can give you that feeling of distance. We feel their different lives through their completely different accents.”

Actors also don’t have to use their accents in the same way throughout the play. Soruvell says it’s not real: “It’s an emotional game. “The accent we speak changes based on who we’re talking to and the emotional state we’re in. This is realistic. “

Soruvell says that while learning and using an accent is a daunting process, it shouldn’t get in the way of the actor’s main goal:

“Because I’m an actor,” she said, “I know that accents aren’t going to be a drag, like weight or something that distracts them. Getting the most distinctive features, the prominence, the important features of the accent is the most important thing. Yes. It’s like trying on shoes. Find a comfortable accent profile because storytelling is what counts.”

“Her Portmanteau” will be in theaters October 11-30. For ticket information, Click here.

For more information on Charles Paulino please visit his blog.