Review: In ‘Nollywood Dreams,’ a Star and an Industry Are Born

Producing more than 1,000 movies a year each, Bollywood, India’s Hindi film industry, and Nollywood, the Nigerian version, have long outpaced the California dream-makers who think they rule the world in Hollywood.

It is against this shift in the shaping of global culture that “Nollywood Dreams,” a giddy if wobbly comedy by Jocelyn Bioh, plays out.

But the template is pure MGM: Our sweet heroine, Ayamma Okafor (Sandra Okuboyejo), works, along with her tart sister Dede (Nana Mensah), in their parents’ travel agency in Lagos. When the rising film director Gbenga Ezie (Charlie Hudson III) announces open auditions for the title role in his latest project, “The Comfort Zone” — yes, there’s a title role — Ayamma sees a chance to “be like the women in all of those Hollywood films I spent my life watching” and become a star herself.

There are complications, of course, but this being a 90-minute comedy, not many. Gbenga has all but promised the role of Comfort to his former lover, Fayola Ogunleye (Emana Rachelle), a somewhat tarnished star known as “the Nigerian Halle Berry with Tina Turner Legs.” And what of Wale Owusu (Ade Otukoya), Nigeria’s “Sexiest Man Born,” slated to play the hero in the movie and perhaps in Ayamma’s life as well? What, indeed!

If this sounds more like a soap opera than a film, that’s because Nollywood in the early 1990s, when the play is set, was still in its artistic infancy. (Bioh writes in an introduction to the script that movies of that period, which she watched as a child, were low budget, “shot with very limited takes” and heavily dependent on improvisation.) Half the fun of Saheem Ali’s staging for MCC Theater, which opened on Thursday night, is in seeing how those drawbacks, when borrowed by West Africans, become selling points of a new aesthetic.

Or perhaps an old one: “Nollywood Dreams” is spirited and casual, with the knockabout rhythms and narrative shortcuts of Hollywood in its early years, before flickers became films. On Arnulfo Maldonado’s shape-shifting set, the action cuts between three locations: the travel agency, Gbenga’s office and a television studio where the beloved talk-show host Adenikeh, “the Nigerian Oprah Winfrey,” conveniently interviews the other characters so they can provide bald updates on the plot.