That the burdens are not as fresh or surprising as in the earlier works may be the inevitable result of time’s passing within the world Ms. Udofia created. “Sojourners” already established the incipient mental disarray threatening to undermine Disciple (Chiké Johnson) and thus his uneasy new alliance with Abasiama (Patrice Johnson Chevannes). By the time “runboyrun,” directed by Loretta Greco, finds them locked in the same struggle decades later, there is little drama left in it.

Indeed, Disciple’s life in 2012 is not a new disaster. Though a brilliant scholar of African history, he finds himself at 56 an adjunct teacher at a community college, where he has recently been the subject of complaints by students about his hygiene. At home, in a careworn old pile of a house in Worcester, Mass., he alternates between muteness and mania, trying to cleanse the rooms of unwelcome spirits but also wildly accusing Abasiama of sleeping with men at her church.

In response to years of this treatment, Abasiama has become almost larval in her despair. As the play begins she hibernates on the living room sofa, so bundled under blankets (the house is under-heated) that she seems to have become a part of it. Even so, she eventually bestirs herself to tell Disciple that she wants a divorce. If it is the first time she has done so, it will not be the last.

But “runboyrun” complicates this domestic drama with what amounts to a ghost story; there are other characters living in the house, or at least in Disciple’s delusions of it. These are his mother and siblings and younger self, in 1968, noncombatants caught in the midst of Nigeria’s civil war over the breakaway region of Biafra. Nearly starving, frequently shelled, unthinkably brave, they help us identify, reasonably but perhaps too neatly, Disciple’s lifelong problems as a form of post-traumatic stress.

“Sometimes peace cannot exist,” his mother tells him in one of these flashbacks. Though she is referring to the unhinged animosities of war, we understand the phrase to apply to individuals as well.