creation stories and all the important importants ★★★★

The creation that is creation stories and all the important importants has one asset so major that it’s impossible to ignore: its transfixing leading lady, Abigail C. Onwunali.

In this past spring’s Broadway revival of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Onwunali had a late-play entrance but still managed to grab the production and shake it to dramatic heights it’d yet to achieve. Now, at LCT3, she IS the play from start to finish — she practically never leaves the stage — and, as was the case when Viola Davis made her Broadway debut in August Wilson’s Seven Guitars (which, coincidentally, Lincoln Center is reviving next month), anyone lucky enough to be in the audience knows they may be witnessing the start of a major career for a formidable actress.

Playwright Mfoniso Udofia and director Tamilla Woodard put Onwunali through her paces: she spends much of the play literally racing around Jason Ardizzone-West’s colorful, playful set as her character, thegrownwoman, tries to make her day measure up to the exceptional standards she sets for herself and believes everyone around her expects of her: “You just have to do it. What you are made for.”

A college professor of playwriting, thegrownwoman is undergoing an intensive IVF cycle, caring for her mother, and battling writer’s block, all while trying to keep her internal anxieties at bay. Those challenges are personified by the two other fine performers in the play: Savannah Commodore, who just played Onwunali’s daughter in Joe Turner and here portrays thegrownwoman’s trombone-toting 10-year-old self; and Donnetta Lavinia Grays, who wittily embodies both a twisted form of Amazon’s Alexa and a rapping horse.

Because Udofia has made her endearing protagonist an expert at dramatic writing, thegrownwoman, midway through the play, begins tossing out direct challenges to those, including reviewers, who may criticize the play for failing to fit the rigid definition of a well-made play: “Basically, unity of action is a knife that cuts the fat: No scene unless it advances the play. No subplot unless it serves the plot. No character unless they forward the action.”

As expected, Udofia flings Aristotelian rules into the wings to perish. So how does the play fare without them?

Decently. But the play does feel cluttered, and the jumble often undermines what works. Udofia’s ambitions don’t always cohere, but Onwunali makes the challenge of realizing them riveting.