'By the Way, Meet Vera Stark' (Signature Theatre Company)

It’s been a while since I’ve seen two productions of the same play—a contemporary one, I mean, of course, not a classic—particularly since I started posting reports on Rick On Theater.  That is, until I caught the revival of Lynn Nottage’s By the Way, Meet Vera Stark at the Signature Theatre Company at 8 p.m. on Friday, 23 February 2019.  I had seen the Second Stage première on 19 May 2011 (see my report, posted on 27 May 2011).  I’m pleased to report that my opinion of the play did not change; in that 2011 play report, I wrote: “If I taught playwriting . . . Vera Stark would be one of the models I’d promote in class.  It’s a perfect example of top-flight dramaturgy . . . .”  I still feel that way.

By the Way, Meet Vera Stark premièred at the Second Stage Theatre in the Theatre District on 9 May 2011 (after previews starting on 6 April) and closed on 12 June.  The production was directed by Jo Bonney   with Sanaa Lathan, who won the 2012 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Lead Actress for her performance in the title role.  (The production also won the Lortel for Outstanding Costume Design for ESosa, the professional name of designer Emilio Sosa.)  The production was also nominated for Drama Desk and AUDELCO Awards.  The play ran at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles on 18 September-28 October 2012, again with Bonney at the helm and Lathan on stage, and then at the Goodman Theatre, Chicago, Illinois, from 27 April to 2 June 2013, staged by Chuck Smith with Tamberla Perry as Vera.

The Signature revival, the first mounting in New York City since the première, directed by Kamilah Forbes, Executive Producer of the Apollo Theater, began previews on 29 January 2019 on the Irene Diamond Stage of the Pershing Square Signature Center and opened on 19 February; the production is scheduled to close on 10 March (extended from 3 March).  Forbes’s revival for STC runs two hours and 25 minutes with one intermission.

For a more detailed synopsis of Vera Stark’s plot, I refer ROTters to my 2011 report (https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2011/05/by-way-meet-vera-stark.html), which also includes a biographical and dramaturgical profile  of the author, but broadly, Nottage is writing about the Hollywood of the 1930s and the treatment—or maltreatment—of African-American actresses of the era, inspired by Nottage’s admiration of black performers such as Butterfly McQueen (1911-95), Stepin Fetchit (1902-85), Hattie McDaniel (1893-1952), Bill “Bojangles” Robinson (1877-1949), Louise Beavers (1902-62), and Eddie “Rochester” Anderson (1905-77) who suffered indignities and worse just to play maids, hookers, shoe-shine boys, and Pullman porters.  (Nottage’s title character is based loosely on real-life actress Theresa Harris, 1906-85, who made a career from the ’30s through the ’50s playing maids to some of Hollywood’s biggest female stars.)  The playwright also lets us see the repercussions of this history in a 2003 academic conference on Vera Stark’s career and a glimpse of her video appearance, by way of a live reenactment, on a 1973 daytime talk show (think The Ellen DeGeneres Show or the old Merv Griffin Show—but cheesy.)

When word spreads that one studio is about to shoot a Civil War epic à la Gone with the Wind or Raintree County, the refrain among Vera and her friends is that that means “slaves with lines.”  The African-American actors are ready to play slaves—as long as it means actually being able to speak on camera.  As one of Nottage’s black characters says, “[W]hy we still playing slaves?  Shucks, it was hard enough getting free the first time.”  The response?  “It’s steady work—and it beats picking cotton.”

The original staging of Vera Stark came years before the prominence of #MeToo and #TimesUp and the movement to obtain equal pay and treatment of female actors in the movie business (exemplified when Mark Wahlberg donated the pay he received in 2018 for reshoots of a movie when he learned that co-star Michelle Williams was paid substantially less for her work on the same job).  It also predated the #OscarSoWhite movement that came to the nation’s attention in 2015 to draw awareness to the lack of diversity in the recognition of film excellence.  Nottage and Forbes didn’t make any changes in the script or the interpretation of the play to capitalize on these industry upheavals, but they informed those of us who are seeing the play now in contrast—or perhaps I should call it “enhancement”—to seeing it eight years ago.  This, of course, isn’t a directorial choice; it’s just history moving on. 

I was delighted to see, also, that the two productions didn’t vary in quality, either.  I was sort of waiting to see if my enjoyment of the Second Stage première was due to the great production at the Tony Kiser Theater, but I liked the STC production just as much as I had the earlier one—and I was strongly reminded of what it was that I liked so much: the way Nottage let her story unfold and how she brought it to life.  I was also impressed again with the way the playwright used humor—even broad humor—to make very serious points without ever sacrificing either the funniness or the import of what she was showing us.  (Thus what I labeled “top-flight dramaturgy.”)  I’m not a playwright and one of the reasons I’m not is that I can’t do that.  I can, however, recognize the ability in others and appreciate it for the talent it represents.

The performances at Signature are all excellent.  I said of the cast of the Second Stage première, “I don’t remember seeing a play in quite some time in which the entire ensemble was all working on the same level as consistently as this one” and concluded that “all the actors who played two roles not only differentiated between them, . . . but created two perfectly apt and well-defined characters.”  I had the same impression from Forbes’s cast.  Sure there are significant differences between Lathan’s Vera and Jessica Frances Dukes’s, and Stephanie J. Block’s 2011 rendition of Gloria, the white starlet for whom Vera works as a maid, and Jenni Barber’s at STC, but both are honest—within the farcical outlines into which Nottage has fitted them—and complete portrayals. 

The same is true of the rest of the cast as well.  Standouts, in addition to Barber and Dukes, include Warner Miller as Leroy Barksdale, the film director’s chauffeur who makes a play for Vera, and Carra Patterson’s Anna Mae Simpkins, one of Vera’s two actress-roommates who’s passing as a Brazilian ex-pat.  (I can attest to the fact that when Patterson returns in act two as Afua Assata Ejobo, a lesbian poet, in the conference scenes, and Miller appears as the self-important academic conference host, Herb Forrester, I could barely remember their earlier personations, so thoroughly did they and the other actors morph into their new roles.  ROTters may recall that I made a similar observation about the cast of Lileana Blain-Cruz’s revival of Lynn Nottage’s Fabulation at STC last December; see my report posted on 10 January 2019.)  Singling out a few actors, however, isn’t really fair because the entire ensemble is top notch, and they play off one another superbly.

The staging was also of the same high quality here as it was at Second Stage.  In fact, Clint Ramos’s opening set, the Hollywood apartment of Gloria Mitchell, the white starlet known as “America’s Little Sweetie Pie,” was, like Neil Patel’s in 2011, an evocation of one of those impossibly lavish Art Deco flats we’ve seen in the movies of that era, all white and chrome with up-center French doors through which actresses like Loretta Young liked to make dramatic entrances—which Forbes has Barber’s Gloria do a couple of times. 

Ramos does equally well with the contrasting first-act set for Vera’s neat-but-cramped apartment, which she shares with Lottie McBride (Heather Alicia Simms) and Anna Mae, two other aspiring African-American actresses.  (McBride and Dukes still nail that wonderful scene during a party at Gloria’s—where they’re working as waitresses—when they try to impress the Russian émigré director, Manoel Felciano’s Maximilian Von Oster, of the Southern epic, The Belle of New Orleans.  (Van Oster, by the way, arrives with Anna Mae on his arm, his Latin bombshell of a date.)  They perform a couple of hilarious bits as “Negroes of the earth” to “audition” for slave roles in his film.  The 180-degree transformation, as if on cue, is simultaneously hilarious and devastating.)

Ramos’s sets are perfectly complimented by Dede M. Ayite’s costumes which evoke both the three periods Vera Stark  spans (1933, 1973, and 2003) and the various characters the actors inhabit. (Just as in 2011, you must get a load of Vera’s 1973 flowing, multi-colored get-up in the TV show.  The panelists at the academic conference, Rediscovering Vera Stark, wore a collection of character-defining ensembles that were at once outrageous and right-on.) 

And while we’re on the subject of the production side of the revival, I must compliment Katherine Freer for the slides that helped establish the atmosphere for all the periods and locales, and producer Caroline Onikute, cinematographer Shawn Peters, editor Keith Davis, and their team for the wonderful clip of The Belle of New Orleans (scored convincingly by Daniel Kluger) screened in the last scene, showing the final cut of footage we saw Gloria rehearsing with Vera when the starlet is preparing for her screen test.  We can see that between the two of them, they turn the melodramatic, clichéd, and racist scene into a heart-rending performance—and from what has gone on before, we know it has been Vera’s coaching that made it so.

The press coverage for the Signature Theatre Company’s By the Way, Meet Vera Stark was relatively meagre, especially for a double Pulitzer-winner.  Show-Score counted only 25 “Critics’ Reviews” (as of 5 March) and, not counting a few duplications (where a writer’s review appeared on more than one platform), I found a couple of more.  Based on the 25, Show-Score gave Vera Stark an average rating of 74, which isn’t very high—particularly when you consider how good I thought the show was.  Of all the notices tallied by the site, 76% were positive, 20% were mixed, and 4% were negative.  Show-Score’s highest-scoring reviews were seven 85’s (including Broadway World, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal), with five 80’s coming up next (CurtainUp and Talkin’ Broadway, among others); the lowest score was a 45 (Broadway & Me), preceded by two 55’s (including Theatre’s Leiter Side).  My survey will comprise 16 reviews.

In the Wall Street Journal, Terry Teachout declared Vera Stark “one of the smartest plays, by Ms. Nottage or anyone else, to open in New York in recent years.”  The WSJ reviewer explained:

If you know Lynn Nottage from “Intimate Apparel” and “Sweat,” her most frequently produced plays, you might well make the mistake of supposing that she’s a dead-serious kitchen-sink realistic playwright.  That’s part of why her Signature Theatre “residency,” in the course of which the deservedly admired off-Broadway company will revive two of Ms. Nottage’s earlier plays and give the premiere of a new one later this season, is so important an event: The plays that she has picked for production are nothing like the ones for which she is now best known.  First came “Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine,” her 2004 satire about the black bourgeoisie, which Signature staged in December to riotous effect.  Now the company is mounting “By the Way, Meet Vera Stark,” an even more original play that was first produced eight years ago by Second Stage Theatre.  It is, like “Fabulation,” a comedy with a sharp satirical kick, but one that is at bottom commandingly serious.

(I quote this passage at length because it not only makes an important point about Nottage and Signature relating to this production, but it echoes what I’ve been saying about the playwright’s work in my reports on Fabulation and now, Vera Stark.) 

Teachout was loath to reveal too much detail, touting Nottage’s surprises, but he added that “Ms. Nottage keeps you guessing all the way to the final curtain.”  The Journalist did complain that “‘By the Way, Meet Vera Stark’ would profit from a slightly less frenetic production,” despite the playwright’s instruction in the script, “one that allowed the play’s comic punches to land on their own instead of being telegraphed to the viewer.”  On the other hand, Teachout proclaimed, “The cast, however, is splendid—Ms. Dukes is a find—and Clint Ramos’s set is downright lavish.”  He gave “special credit” to Katherine Freer, responsible for The Belle of New Orleans “clip,” and Daniel Kluger, “who scored it so convincingly that you'll swear it came out of a Hollywood vault.”  In the end, Teachout summed up that Vera Stark is “witty and thoughtful in equal measure, and much of it—most of it, in fact—is also chokingly funny.”  He recommended his readers see the productions, adding, “All of [Nottage’s] plays are this good, and all of them are completely different.”

Barbara Schuler of Long Island’s Newsday’s Bottom Line for Vera Stark was: “Humorous, thought-provoking play explores  racism in Hollywood.”  She dubbed the play “humorous, thought-provoking” and “yet another example of the meticulous research Nottage is known for.”  Schuler, however, asserted that Vera Stark really “should be considered two plays”: a “pure screwball comedy” in act one and a second act which “has a harder edge.”  The playwright, the Newsday reviewer pointed out, “gets in . . . social criticism, while not letting up on her key premise—the lack of meaningful roles for women of color in Hollywood, clearly a precursor to the #OscarsSoWhite movement. . . .  Think of it as the kind of theater where no one is safe.” 

Alexis Soloski called the play a “barbed and booby-trapped comedy” in the New York Times, “a play, often a very funny one, about representation and erasure.”  Of the screwball first act, Soloski observed that Forbes “doesn’t always nail the fouetté-on-a-dime rhythms and not all of the actors are on the same page (figuratively, mostly) it’s still a delight.”  She described act two as “more like a screwball tragedy.”  “The play is fizzy and then it isn’t,” Soloski asserted, “because fizz goes flat when you really consider the careers that could have been and the blinkered ones that were.”  Vera Stark “is not especially orderly,” said the Times reviewer.  “But it is such a good show—so clever, so playful, so keen to shapeshift and timeslip and whiz through half a dozen separate genres . . . — that I spent the next several days trying to figure out why it isn’t an absolutely great one.”  Soloski explained:

Maybe that’s because “Vera Stark” depends on a kind of absence.  We see Vera in various contexts—as servant, as friend, as aspiring actress and bantering back lot doll. In these scenes she mostly plays herself, except when she’s trying to charm a director who doesn’t want to hire a black woman unless he can see “100 years of oppression in the hunch of her shoulders.”  But that self is fluid, mutable.

Vera “keeps shifting out of focus,” Soloski found, but not because “the performances aren’t vivid.”  The review-writer concluded:

The production tries to counter this.  There are a few attempts to pinion Vera, but something in the character keeps sliding out and away.  She’s too slippery for real tragedy, too evasive for farce.  She’s the screen before the projector warms up, ready to show us whatever woman our imperfect hearts can dream.

In New York magazine, Sara Holdren labeled the play “a satire, a eulogy, and, in some ways, an homage.”  It’s “directed with zingy energy” but “can at times feel like a revue by an aging vaudeville star—a bit broad, a bit padded.”  Nonetheless, “it’s anchored by a crackling central performance by Jessica Frances Dukes.”  Furthermore, felt Holdren, “it’s a compelling reminder of Nottage’s playful inventiveness.”  But the reviewer from New York had a caveat:

Nottage is throwing a dart at a very fine point—the bull’s eye of really good satire, something that feels sharp and true enough that it absorbs and transcends caricature.  It’s a hard shot to make, and both as a play and in this production, Vera Stark doesn’t always succeed at avoiding parodic broadness.

The problem, said Holdren, is that “the break” between the Hollywood fantasy and the real-world reality “lacks definition.”  (“There’s a kind of logic at work here,” observed the New York reviewer: “The only scenes that calm down a bit . . . are the scenes without any white folks.”)  In the end, Holdren felt that “if Vera Stark sometimes shoots wide of the mark, it’s still taking aim at something profound—and, like Vera herself, it’s part of an audacious ongoing dramatic legacy.”

Sarah Larson of the New Yorker dubbed the STC production “a vibrant revival of Lynn Nottage’s satirical 2011 play.”  The review-writer found that “it’s contemplative and structurally bold” and “conveys no wistfulness for the way it was.”  “Not everything in ‘Vera Stark’ works,” reported Larson, “—the performances are often heightened in a way that hurts the play more than helps it—but its ending which . . . shows us why Vera’s performance was so striking, is revelatory.”  Larson concluded: “Dukes brings a subtle power to the scene; Nottage’s words deliver an emotional wallop.  The results are utterly transporting—exactly what we go to the theatre for.”

By the Way, Meet Vera Stark “walks and talks like a screwball comedy, it has a real brain in its head,” declared Marilyn Stasio in Variety.  Vera’s roommate, Lottie, for instance,

speaks from a lifetime of anger and hurt, detailing the realities that thinking people think they already know; but hearing them through Nottage’s strong dialogue and in Simms’s powerful voice is a real punch in the gut.

Stasio reported that the first act ends in “high comedy” (the impromptu audition of Lottie and Vera), but act two is “a downer” due to “its jarring shift in style.”

Helen Shaw of Time Out New York asserted of Vera Stark: “Although the Signature production often misses its step, it’s a welcome reminder that Nottage has a tricky pinball brain, capable of whanging through the decades and lighting us up with humor and rage.”  Calling the play “a postmodern comedy,” Shaw felt that the playwright “loses the laser focus of her satirical attack” in the second act “partly because she whirls from target to target” and Forbes’s “staging slow[s] things down” as well.  Cautioning that comedy needs special handling, the reviewer from TONY added that the director’s “experience is mainly in dramas, and so the tonal balance is wonky here.”  The staging, Shaw found, “elicits exaggerated performances; it often seems like the actors are playing to a nonexistent balcony.” 

In the cyber press, Tulis McCall (who also posts on Stage Buddy) called Nottage “a brave writer” on Front Row Center.  “She sees an idea that needs examining and she goes in with everything from a pick axe to a laser.”  McCall found that act one “is fast and often slick, with most of the characters being caricatures.”  The FRC reviewer, though, deemed “[t]he breath of freshness” here to be Gloria, the white star, rather than the black characters, including Vera, to whose story the play is devoted.  In act two, according to McCall, the focus shifts to Vera—until the end of the TV talk show when Gloria returns to the stage and the two actresses “battle for the spotlight like two old soldiers.”  McCall asserted, “This is a well intentioned play that never lands in one spot.  We hear about Vera’s struggles in a way that is more a litany than a gut punch.”  The review-writer contended that “we never get into the heart of this woman. . . . We see it but we don’t feel it.   Everyone is a caricature and the beating hearts that keep them alive never surface.”

On Broadway World, Michael Dale declared the STC revival of Vera Stark a “crackling good new mounting.”  Elyse Sommer of CurtainUp labeled the play “a fiendishly clever satire” that “starts out as screwball comedy” and then “turns meta-theatrical.”  Sommer found that “the second act still has some problems,” but “Director Forbes has done her utmost to help her actors make the most of the play's many hilarious acting opportunities.”  The CU reviewer found, “The second act's structural shift is fun and ingeniously merges the three” periods of the play, but Vera’s “story loses some of its vitality when she's talked about rather than acting out her own story.”  Despite this, Sommer concluded, “I was happy to meet this Vera Stark—as I think you too will be.”

James Wilson of Talkin’ Broadway characterized the STC production of Vera Stark “a visually stunning revival” of a play that “does not stint on great ideas and tackles pressing social issues.”  Wilson, however. admonished his readers, “The play is a satire, though, and the heady, intellectual queries drift breezily above the comic hijinks.”  He added, however, that “there are a lot of laughs, but sometimes at the expense of rich character development.”  “Still,” the TB reviewer reported, “as directed by Kamilah Forbes, this is a topnotch production.”  Wilson concluded, “The play does not try to conceal the underlying dark truths, but they are made palatable (and immensely entertaining) as if projected with the gloss and panache of a 1930s film epic.”

Jesse Oxfeld, in the first of two reviews on New York Stage Review, warned, “Vera Stark attempts many things at once.” 

It is a satire of Golden Age Hollywood that tries to play, in its first act, as its own screwball comedy.  It is an acknowledgement of the limitations people of color found—still find—even when they achieve popular success.  It is a look at how the celebrity culture chews up and spits out people as they age.  It is a mirror accentuating the degree to which everything in entertainment is an image, a lie. It is a spoof, in its second act, of modern, identity-based academic culture.  And it is also a sympathetic take on what women like Vera, and Hattie, went through.

Oxfeld characterized the production as “elegant” and the play as “funny, smart, frequently clever, and ultimately successful in achieving only some of its goals.”  Like Fabulation, Oxfeld noted, Vera Stark is “a whipsawed mix of realism and absurdity.  And here it doesn’t always work.”  Carving out exceptions for the final scene of act one, the end of Gloria’s cocktail party, and Vera’s diva turn on the 1973 talk show, the reviewer caviled that “the early scenes lag, and the academic spoof in the second act is obvious and unnecessary.  And the hinted-at deep secret—that Vera and Gloria were related, that what we think of as black-and-white is never really thus—is left unexplored.”  His final remark was: “The point is that everything is artifice, everyone has a shtick, at least in Hollywood, and that eventually everyone gets stuck in that rut.  Especially Vera Stark, who had the least choice about it.”

In the second NYSR review, Melissa Rose Bernardo proclaimed that Vera “is one of the juiciest characters Lynn Nottage has ever written,” but that her play “is one of Nottage’s least cohesive—enjoyable and zany, but uncharacteristically uneven.”  Act one “has a screwball-comedy feel” but act two “is like an entirely different play.” 

On Theatre’s Leiter Side, Samuel L. Leiter, calling Vera Stark “a satirically serious look at Hollywood’s treatment of black actresses,” lamented that it succeeded for him “only half way.”  One reason, apparently, is that “Act Two . . . shifts gears grindingly” and another may be that, though she “redeems herself brilliantly” in act two, Dukes is “required to overact in Act One.”  Leiter expressed other quibbles as well.  The blogger’s principal complaint seems to have been, “Nottage’s intelligence, wit, and craftsmanship are writ large throughout the play, but its stylistic leaps along the spectrum from farce to realism do little to draw one into its world and lots to keep one at a distance.”  This is furthered by the failure of Forbes’s directing of the “barely nuanced production . . . to find a tone that consistently ties its disparate scenes together.”  Leiter summed up: “With a few exceptions, the approach is forced farce, seeking laughs by egregiously overstated comic acting, and excessive shouting, which pulls focus from Nottage’s ideas.” 

On Broadway & Me, the website with Show-Score’s lowest rating (45) for Vera Stark, in a notice Show-Score says is by Janice C. Simpson (there’s no byline on the page), the reviewer characterized Nottage’s play as “simultaneously a comedy, a tragedy, a call to arms and, especially in its second act, structurally adventurous.”  Simpson found that “Kamilah Forbes . . . has a tougher time [than Jo Bonney, who directed the 2011 production] finding the right rhythm.”    The B&M blogger felt, “At times the pacing is too fast and jokes fly by before they can register.  Other moments drag on, particularly a few of the segments that use video.”  Accompanied by her sister, who fell asleep before the end of the play, Simpson tried to recap what happened, but “realized I’d already forgotten.  Which kind of breaks my heart since remembering Vera is the whole point of the piece.”

“You may be tempted to bail after the sluggish first act of Lynn Nottage’s By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, now receiving an adequate revival at Signature Theatre—but you shouldn’t,” cautioned Zachary Stewart on TheaterMania.  In a reversal of most (I daresay all) other reviewers, Stewart continued: “The second act is the best part.  It’s where we truly meet the actor Vera Stark.”  (“Simms and Patterson’s [second-act] dueling side-eye is the most thrilling stage combat currently in New York,” proclaimed Stewart.  Dukes’s turn in the TV talk show has her “enacting one of the most striking character transformations I’ve ever witnessed.”)  The TM reviewer observed, “The Hollywood machine that feeds on black actors is an uncommon subject for comedy, but Nottage is an uncommon writer.”  The play “is at its best when . . . subtly honest humor bubbles to the surface,” asserted Stewart, “but the comedy is usually more ponderous,” though the review-writer blamed this more on the “material” than Forbes’s “competent directing.”  In Stewart’s final estimation, “The result is a thoughtful tribute to the black actresses of a bygone era” and Vera Stark  “makes the case that they deserve more than just a passing introduction.”

[I probably shouldn’t do this, but the repeated remarks among the critiques of the 2019 revival of By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, which are much the same as some that appeared in 2011, that there’s a conflict in style between act one and act two of the play and production, makes me feel I have to repeat my response of eight years ago to this perception.  Here’s what I said then:

The apparent disconnect, as Michael Feingold has it in The Village Voice, between act one and act two, when the style changes some, didn’t pull me up—all three scenes (the 1933 Hollywood, the 1973 talk show, the 2003 academic conference) were all satires, filtered through the sensibility of each era.  What reviewers like [David] Rooney [of The Hollywood Reporter] seem to have missed is that Nottage isn’t just sending up the Hollywood of the ’30s or examining the lives on the African-American actors trying to navigate the gated world.  In the second part of the play, she’s looking critically at the way we turn flawed people into legends and use them as vessels for our own aspirations and agendas.  That’s what Brad Donovan [the TV talk-show host] and Peter Rhys-Davies [a British rocker guest] do in 1973 and the three conference panelists do in 2003—and Nottage is showing us how we all do it. Vera may be little more than a washed up drunk pretending she’s still 25, but we project onto her a whole wealth of fun-house nostalgia because we need her to have been a hero so we can stand on her shoulders.  The first act of Vera Stark isn’t just a funny send-up of screwball depression Hollywood.  It’s the material on which act two comments, like the commentary in the Talmud or the critical analysis that follows and draws on a piece of literature.  The two parts of Vera Stark aren’t discontinuous; they fit together like two halves of a torn photograph.  Besides, what saved even the frisson of discontinuity from splitting the play, is the way Nottage got her critical intent across by means of the jokes and parody not around or in spite of them.]  

'Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine'

[To those of you who have come to Rick On Theater in the past few weeks looking for a report on Lynn Nottage’s play Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine, which I saw at the Signature Theatre almost a month ago, I apologize.  I suffered a perfect storm of disruptions that caused an inordinate delay in getting this report on the blog.  First, I had to finish some work that took more attention and more time than I anticipated; then I lost several additional days when I caught some minor bug that laid me up (and, pardon my scatology, had me running to the bathroom half a day; and then, that most devastating of all circumstances for an electronic publication like ROT, my computer died and I was without the machine—and the Internet and my word processor—for about four days.  The Fabulation report was partly written, but I couldn’t finish it and I couldn’t post it till now.  The play has only this week to run at Signature—it closes in 13 January—and I prefer to post my performance reports with enough time for readers who become interested to get a chance to see the plays on which I write.  Well, Man proposes and God disposes . . . and He really disposed this time!  Sorry.]

There are a lot of rags-to-riches stories, including on screen and stage, looking at upward mobility from various perspectives.  The Mayor of Casterbridge, the 1886 novel by the English writer and poet Thomas Hardy, in literature and, in pop culture, The Jeffersons, the CBS sitcom of the 1970s and ’80s, both leap to mind.  Less often do you find a treatment of the riches-to-rags downward mobility.  That’s where Lynn Nottage’s Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine, in revival at the Signature Theatre Company on Theatre Row where the dramatist is currently playwright-in-residence, comes in.

Prior to Fabulation, I’d only seen one of Nottage’s plays, By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, which I saw in 2011 at Second Stage (coming to STC in January).  (I haven’t seen either of the writer’s Pulitzer Prize-winners, Ruined, 2007, or Sweat, 2015.  My report on Vera Stark’s première production was posted on Rick On Theater on 27 May 2011; my report on Signature’s revival will appear early in 2019.) 

The première  of Fabulation was staged by Kate Whoriskey, Nottage’s longtime collaborator, at New York’s Playwrights Horizons from 13 June to 11 July 2004 with Charlayne Woodard as Undine; it won the  2005 Obie Award for Playwriting.  Revivals and various regional premières have been mounted around the country and abroad in the ensuing 14 years.  The STC revival, the first in New York City since the première, began previews on 19 November 2018 and opened on 10 December; the production is currently scheduled to close on 13 January 2019 (after having been extended twice from 30 December and 6 January).  I saw the 7:30 p.m. performance in the Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre at the Pershing Square Signature Center on Friday, 19 December (without my usual theater companion, who declined to accompany me to either of the Nottage productions).

Kenny Leon directed a one-night-only benefit presentation (for Opening Act, an organization that sponsors free theater programs) of Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine with Tonya Pinkins and Anika Noni Rose at the New World Stages in Manhattan on 21 April 2015.  There is a Dramatists Play Service acting edition of the text of Fabulation published in 2005 and a 2006 literary edition, published with Nottage’s Intimate Apparel by the Theatre Communications Group.  It’s also available in the collection Contemporary Plays by African American Women: Ten Complete Works (University of Illinois Press, 2015) and as an audiobook from L.A. Theatre Works (a recording of the Playwrights Horizons 2004 mounting). 

Lynn Nottage was born in 1964 in New York City, and grew up in Brooklyn, where she still lives.  Having begun writing scripts in her journal as a youngster—she attended Saint Ann’s School, an arts-oriented private school in Brooklyn Heights—Nottage went to New York City’s High School of Music and Art (now part of the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts near Lincoln Center) and then Providence, Rhode Island’s Brown University, from which she graduated in 1986, returning for a 2011 Doctor of Fine Arts degree.  She went on to the Yale School of Drama where she completed her Master of Fine Arts degree in 1989. The playwright has also received honorary degrees from New York City’s Juilliard School and Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania (the locale of two of her recent works, Sweat, her 2017 Pulitzer Prize-winning play—and her first Broadway production that same year— and This Is Reading, a site-specific multimedia installation blending live performance and visual media, also from 2017.

The dramatist worked as a press officer for Amnesty International after graduating from Yale, but later returned to writing.  (While at Music & Art, Nottage had written her first full-length play, The Darker Side of Verona, about an African-American Shakespeare company traveling through the south.)  Poof!, premièred in 1993 at the Actors Theatre of Louisville during the Humana Festival of New American Plays, garnered the Heideman Award as the winner of the National Ten-Minute Play Contest.  (A one-hour adaptation was subsequently broadcast in 2002 on the Public Broadcasting System’s American Shorts.  Viola Davis and Rosie Perez starred.)  In addition to her playwriting, she has worked as a visiting lecturer while her plays have been produced around the world. 

Nottage has also received a number of other prestigious awards for her playwriting in addition to her two Pulitzer Prizes for Drama.  (The writer won her first Pulitzer in 2009 for Ruined, which dramatizes the plight of Congolese women surviving civil war.)  These include a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in  both 1994 and 2000, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005, and a 2007 MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship.  In 2017, Nottage was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Science and, in 2018, into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, from which she had won their 2017 Award of Merit as “an outstanding playwright for her body of work.”

A comic rags-to-riches-to rags tale about a self-made Black American Princess from the projects of Fort Greene, Brooklyn, before that neighborhood (home to the Brooklyn Academy of Music) was transformed into an arts-and-culture hub, Fabulation is also a story about remaking yourself—and the consequences that can result.  Undine Barnes Calles (Cherise Boothe), who was born Sharona Watkins (Undine renamed herself after Undine Spragg of Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country, a social climber who goes from marriage to marriage up the social ladder), is a powerful and successful publicist for the rich and prominent.  Driven and ambitious—Nottage has said that she was inspired to invent the character after reading a biography of Condoleeza Rice—Undine runs her own “fierce boutique PR firm catering to the vanity and confusion of the African-American nouveau riche” and is married to a handsome and charming Argentinian named Hervé (Ian Lassiter).  So far from her working-class roots, Undine, now the product of a private school and Dartmouth College, has been letting on that her family died in a fire. 

In the midst of a busy day at the office, as Undine’s on the phone arranging ways to sell her clients and enhance their public images (and her own), her excitable assistant, Stephie (MaYaa Boateng), ushers her accountant (Dashiell Eaves) into her office.  He bears the frantic news that her husband has absconded with all her assets.  This blow to her carefully constructed self-image—‘fabulation’ means “To tell invented stories, often those that involve fantasy,” according to Wiktionary—shocks Undine’s system so sharply that she has chest pains (which she names “Edna” just to get a laugh) that send her to a doctor.  “Anxiety happens to other people,” she tells him.  But it’s not an anxiety attack that brought on Edna.  Undine is pregnant.

So, bankrupt, pregnant, 37, and abandoned by her erstwhile Manhattan friends (“There is nothing less forgiving than Bourgie Negroes,” says Undine’s childhood friend Allison, played by Nikiya Mathis, to whom she turned for help), Undine has nowhere to go but back to her Brooklyn family—whom she hasn’t seen since reinventing herself.  She laments that she must now return to “my original Negro state.”  So the former Sharona moves back in with her mother and father (Mathis and J. Bernard Calloway), a couple of college-campus security guards; her brother, Flow (Marcus Callender), who’s a Desert Storm veteran and a failed poet; and her heroin-addicted grandmother (Heather Alicia Simms), with whom she’ll be sharing a room. 

The grandmother persuades Undine to make a drug-buy for her and, never having done this before, Undine is caught by the police in the act and arrested.  Undine ends up in court and is sentenced to court-ordered rehab.  In her counselling sessions, Undine is thrown together with a motley assembly of characters, but she’s befriended by Guy (Lassiter), a recovering addict and ex-con who describes himself as “that brother you cross the street to avoid.”  But he’s sincere and is attracted to Undine, who finds the differences between Guy and Hervé (who are—not coincidentally, I think—played by the same actor at STC) make him appealing. 

As she becomes more and more engaged in her new circumstances, Undine experiences many of the same things her former friends and neighbors do every day, including bureaucratic insensitivity and inefficiency at public agencies and daily humiliation and neglect.  She learns that her family has known about her tale that they all died in a fire that had been part of her reinvention of herself.  She also hears that the FBI, who’d been seeking her husband for identity theft, has caught up with Hervé and she goes to visit him in jail.  At a counselling session, Guy tells Undine that he’ll be with her when her baby comes if she wants, and she accepts his offer. 

Facing the people from her past whom she callously and opportunistically cast aside as she created her new self-image, Undine comes to accept them and herself, learning that no one can ever truly outrun her past.  Although she loses her status, her wealth, and, initially, her pride, she comes to see that the values she espoused as Undine Barnes were false and gains wisdom and self-knowledge that had eluded her in her fabulated existence.

The final scene in the play is the birth of Undine’s baby with Guy and Undine’s family around her hospital bed.  The infant cries, and the lights fade.

I enjoyed the play—it’s an early Nottage, before she turned to realism for her Pulitzer winners.  (So was Vera Stark, 2011, which I liked better—though that could have been the production; I’ll see when I see the STC revival in February or March.)  She has (or had) a wonderful way of bending stylization that’s not really Absurdism or Surrealism (or whatever—I haven’t figured that out yet) with more Realistic moments and also taking stereotypes and clichés and making them self-commentary and, at the same time, real—you know, maybe like where the clichés came from in the first place. 

                       

I’m pretty sure Diana wouldn’t have liked this.  Diana likes plays that follow established rules, but Nottage, at least in Vera Stark and Fabulation, like Suzan-Lori Parks and Adrienne Kennedy, follows rules, but they’re rules she made up herself.  It’s going  to be hard to describe this work, though.  I’m not sure I can glean Nottage’s dramaturgical process enough to describe it for someone who hasn’t seen the performance. 

(Other reports on Parks plays are “Venus,” 7 June 2017[ “The Red Letter Plays,” 12 and 17 October 2017; and “The Red Letter Plays, Continued” by Kirk Woodward, 1 November 2017.  I reported on Kennedy’s play Funnyhouse of a Negro in “Signature Plays,” 3 June 2016.  Kirk has also posted two other articles concerning the writing of Suzan-Lori Parks that might be revealing: “A Playwright of Importance,” 31 January 2011, and “How America Eats: Food and Eating Habits in the Plays of Suzan-Lori Parks,” 5 October 2009.)

Something I wrote in my 2011 discussion of Vera Stark is applicable again in Fabulation and I think it’s key.  I said that even if we already know something about the situation and characters the playwright is portraying, “Nottage doesn’t just tell us or even simply illustrate her ideas, she demonstrates them for us, and she does it with great (and I do mean great) humor.”  (There’s something of Bertolt Brecht in this, though I wouldn’t list Brecht as one of Nottage’s obvious influences.  I suspect she’s simply absorbed Brechtian influences the way most American actors have absorbed Stanislavsky: it’s in the air they breathe.)  Little of what happens in Fabulation is surprising to us, but Nottage makes us look at it with eyes (and I’d add, hearts) more open. 

There’s a notable difference with Vera Stark: that play was about a part of Hollywood history that effected African-American actors (and, by extension, all actors of color and women actors); the situation in Fabulation is not tied to any American of a particular race, ethnicity, or gender.  While the dramatist’s story is about an African-American woman and her family and friends, and many tropes from that cultural milieu are depicted, what Undine suffers and overcomes in Nottage’s play could happen to any of us or to someone any of us knows.  (Tom Wolfe’s 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities and its depiction of the fate of Wall Street wolf Sherman McCoy comes to mind.)  While the truths the playwright reveals in Vera Stark strike each viewer from a different perspective, what Nottage shows us in Fabulation should hit all of us from the same angle.  It is a universal tale.

What was most astonishing in this production is that I could swear I saw a cast of 26 (the Times counted the parts)—but in reality it was eight actors playing two dozen-plus roles.  (One actor plays only one role, Cherise Boothe as Undine; the other 25 characters are played by seven actors.)  I never figured out which actors were which group of characters (I didn’t know any of the cast)!  Not one of them was a caricature or a one-dimensional portrayal, however.  It was magnificent work!!  (The director, Lileana Blain-Cruz, who also did Suzan-Lori Parks’s The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World at Signature, which I saw in 2016—see my report on ROT on 1 December 2016—gets a lot of credit for this, too.)

Divided into 15 scenes, each a shift in setting, an average of seven minutes each over the two acts, the play couldn’t sustain a Realistic, or even quasi-Realistic, scenic design.  (I’m calculating on the basis of a two-hour running time minus a 15-minute intermission.)  Director Blain-Cruz moves the action along snappily, as she must—more cinematically than episodically, with scenes flowing one from another almost seamlessly.  The production of Fabulation is complex both stylistically and technically, but Blain-Cruz mounts it  adeptly and smartly.

To accomplish this, of course, scene shifts have to be kept minimal, so set designer Adam Rigg has devised an fluidly evolving acting environment.  Aided immensely by Yi Zhao’s lighting, Rigg’s spare design, based on white cinder-block walls, instantly transforms into a variety of locations by bringing on a few set pieces, just enough to define the place and accommodate the scene’s action and no more.  Palmer Hefferan’s sound design was also effective.  It’s a plain but elegant staging solution.

I’ve mentioned the acting nut the company has to crack, the 25 characters played by seven actors, and I said the cast and director tackle it beautifully.  As the actors morph from one persona to another from scene to scene, though, the unique and distinctive costumes of Montana Levi Blanco and the remarkable hairstyles and wig designs by Cookie Jordan help the performers to transform seemingly instantly and to give theatergoers immediate clues to the characters. 

As excellent as the ensemble is, it’s Cherise Boothe who carries the show as the title character.  It’s a showpiece.  Since Undine is self-invented, she’s artificial, a performance.  Boothe has to play the role as if Sharona were playing Undine.  Then she has to play Sharona re-emerging after she returns to Brooklyn.  Of course, it’s not just Sharona who appears when Undine finds herself back in Fort Greene, but a Sharona who’s now confused and angry with the world.  Boothe pulls off all of these permutations convincingly, movingly, and humorously.  Even as the actor makes us laugh at Undine’s diminishing circumstances, however, she also lets us see the real pain and fear Undine’s experiencing.  That’s a precarious tightrope for an actor to walk, but Boothe struts along it with confidence and bravado.  Undine is an unlikeable person, and in less adroit hands, the audience might cheer her demise—but Boothe has a dry and tart delivery that makes liking Undine a (perhaps guilty) pleasure.  Her Undine may be a figure we’re meant to laugh at, but she’s also someone we empathize with and root for.

Boothe also has to handle Nottage’s stylization, that proprietary style I haven’t been able to name or even describe successfully.  Like the supporting ensemble, much of Undine’s part is a sort of over-the-top Realism—the kind of slightly eccentric acting employed for characters who say and do outrageous things as if they were perfectly ordinary behavior.  It’s common in many farces—even on TV sitcoms.  But Boothe’s character also talks directly to us to comment on the action of the play; she’s the only one who does this.  Those moments of direct address, when Undine steps out of the narrative, aren’t stylized in the same way all the other dialogue in Fabulation is—but it still has to seem like Undine, not Boothe, the actor.  She handles this as smoothly and convincingly as she does the other part of her role. 

This performance is the very exemplar of what makes these plays of Nottage’s, By the Way, Meet Vera Stark and Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine, theatrically special.  She takes stock characters, characters that could easily descend into caricature and cliché, and endows them with truth and honesty.  It depends on the actors and directors to convey this to the audience, so the writer’s taking something of a chance—but when it works out, the play and the production sparkle and move us.  The same is true of Nottage’s signature stylization—the cast has to pull that delicate maneuver off or the production becomes a travesty.  I guess it’s obvious that I think this company, with Boothe setting the pace and Blain-Cruz at the helm, meets the challenge. 

That’s why I love theater.  When something like Fabulation happens, when the singular artistry of a Lynn Nottage comes together with the vision and craft of a Lileana Blain-Cruz and the talents of the company she assembled . . . magic occurs.  There’s nothing else like it in creation.  (Is my geek showing?  Gets loose sometimes.)

Press coverage of Fabulation was spotty, especially for a play by a two-time Pulitzer-winner.  Though three daily papers, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Financial Times, ran reviews, none of the weeklies like New York magazine or the New Yorker covered the production.  Variety didn’t run a notice and none of the radio or TV outlets I often quote did either.  The on-line review sites, however, seemed to have been out in force.  On the basis of 25 reviews that did assess the STC production, Show-Score gave Fabulation an average score of 77, not a terribly high rating.  In the site’s tally, 92% of the notices were positive, 8% mixed, and none negative.  Show-Score’s highest rating was a pair of 90’s (Front Row Center and Carole Di Tosti, both websites), backed up by two 85’s (This Week in New York Blog and one of two notices on New York Stage Review); the lowest score on the site was a 60 for scribicide, preceded by a 65 for The Wrap.  My review survey will comprise 16 outlets. 

In the Wall Street Journal, Terry Teachout labeled Fabulation “a saber-toothed satire about a snooty member of the black bourgeoisie” and confessed that when he first saw the play in 2004 “how flummoxed I was to discover that the author of a play as bleak as ‘Intimate Apparel’ [Nottage’s immediate previous play in New York City, a mere three months earlier] could also be really, really funny.”  He continued that the STC “staging, directed with farce-worthy propulsion by Lileana Blain-Cruz, is full of comic punch—wrapped, as is Ms. Nottage's wont, around a hard core of tough-mindedness.”  (Teachout also declared that in the ensuing years, the playwright has established herself “as a fixed star on the horizon of American theater [and] one of our best playwrights.”)  The Journalist lavished great praise on Boothe, who “[n]ot only . . . rise[s] to the play’s previous comic occasions, but . . . has the underlying gravity.”  He concluided, “This production would be worth seeing for her alone, but there are countless other reasons to go.”

The New York Times’ Jesse Green reported that Times reviewer Ben Brantley had said of Fabulation in 2004 that it was a “busy, robustly entertaining comedy.”  “It still is,” said Green, but admonished us readers that “the world around it has changed so much that the comedy feels, if just as busy, less robust.”  Noting that Fabulation is “something of an outlier for Nottage” in comparison to her Pulitzer-winning plays, which Green said are “undamentally naturalistic and tragic,” the Timesman posited, “Perhaps that’s why ‘Fabulation,’ and thus Ms. Blain-Cruz’s production, feel most accomplished the farther away they get from spoof and closer to reality.”  In conclusion, Green asserted, “What makes ‘Fabulation’ a comedy, albeit one with a bitter edge, is that our heroine is at least allowed to approach her happiness, once she stops trying to be a success.”

“At once mordant and cheerful, Fabulation is melodrama with a method to it,” characterized Max McGuinness in the U.S. edition of the Financial Times.  In comparison with Nottage’s Sweat, McGuinness thought, “Fabulation never lurches into miserabilism and remains consistently hilarious over the course of Lileana Blain-Cruz’s brisk two-hour staging.”  He lauded the performance of Boothe, who “anchors the play with uncommon wit and charisma while seven other actors playing two dozen supporting roles help spin a satisfyingly picaresque yarn.” 

Raven Snook of Time Out New York gave her readers a heads-up that they “may be surprised at the frequent and hearty laughs in Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine.”  She warned, “On the surface, at least, Nottage’s 2004 satire of NYC’s black bourgeoisie is a delectable treat.  But it leaves a serious aftertaste.”  The woman from TONY found that “Lileana Blain-Cruz’s whirlwind staging of Fabulation at the Signature puts humor first, helped by a versatile supporting cast of seven with a knack for sketching broad new identities at the drop of a wig.”  Snook warned again, “You may be cackling too loudly to take it all in as it unfolds but, like a good fable, the play has a message that lingers past its scrappily-ever-after finale.”

In the Hollywood Reporter, Frank Scheck’s “Bottom Line” was “Satire with a bite” and pointed out that it “reveals the playwright working in a distinctly silly mode.”  He reports that “the play earns big laughs with its cheeky, audacious humor.”  The play “occasionally feels too sitcom-like in its approach,” felt Scheck, and “overly reliant on narration” (the soliloquies I mentioned).  “But the play is often very funny indeed,” the HR review-writer reported, “delivering sharp observations about social and racial identity that feel even more relevant today than when it was written.”  He found, “The many one-liners get the intended laughs, but it works even better when it digs a little deeper thematically.”  Scheck deemed Blain-Cruz’s staging “skillful” as it “never allows the pacing to lag” and he dubbed Blanco’s costumes “fun.”  He decided, however, “Most of all, it’s the performers who truly sell the material,” especially Boothe, who “is a hoot in the title role.”  In the end, Scheck affirmed, “Fabulation follows a predictable arc; theatergoers will earn no points for guessing that its title character will have different values by the end of the evening.  But it effectively demonstrates that its talented playwright can make important points via laughter as well as tears.”

In the first of two notices on New York Stage Review, one of the two scoring second-highest on Show-Score with an 85, Steven Suskin proclaimed the play “a wildly funny and wildly outlandish modern-day Everyman.  Or Everywoman.”  Suskin believes that Nottage “is not interested in the road to success” nor “in moralizing.”  The NYSR writer reported, “Every step along Undine’s Job-like path is played limned with sharp jabs of humor, with sometimes sketch-like interludes” as well as those “sardonic and often contradictory” commentaries.  With praise for the design team, Suskin affirmed, “The episodic and escapadish manner of Undine’s un-fabulation is well handled by director Lileana Blain-Cruz.”  He felt that the “return visit of Nottage’s early Fabulation is worthy and highly enjoyable.  The playwright’s unrestrained humor sparks the play with flashes of lightning” and added, “Theatergoers who make it to the Signature for both Fabulation and By the Way, Vera Stark  are in for a back-to-back double treat.”

Michael Sommers, who penned the second NYSR notice, proclaiming Nottage “[o]ne of America’s finest playwrights,” labeled Fabulation “a broad comedy” and the STC production “a dandy . . . revival.”  Also praising the designers, Sommers thought that the director “confidently spins out Undine’s tribulations with a quick and easy hand.”  On Theater Pizzazz, Carol Rocamora declared of Fabulation, “It was a razor-sharp satire in 2004, and it hasn’t lost its cutting edge today” and dubbed it an “absurdist comedy.”  Rocamora praised the “agile ensemble,” who performed under Blain-Cruz’s “slick direction.” 

Elyse Sommer of CurtainUp thought that Fabulation, receiving “a splendidly staged and performed” revival at STC, “lacks the depth of” Ruined and Sweat.  “Very broad satiric humor like [Fabulation] tends to overwhelm the underlying seriousness,” asserted Sommer, but she found that director Blain-Cruz made the play work.  Hayley Levitt characterized the play as “a jaunty balance of camp and commentary” on TheaterMania, but advised that “unlike trips to Nottage’s [Ruined and Sweat], you can leave your box of tissues and paper bag for hyperventilation at home.”  Levitt found, “It’s fun and games for us, but at each punctuated point along this entertaining learning curve, Nottage tucks in glimpses of the generations-old baggage that motivates Undine” to reinvent herself—and the playwright and director “have plenty of fun with the cultural stereotypes.”  The TM review-writer deemed Fabulation’s “patchwork structure . . . unsettlingly sloppy,” but felt “there’s something liberating about the play’s blatant disregard for organization.” 

James Wilson labeled the play “sweeping and satirical” on Talkin’ Broadway, but added that it “seems like a minor work” alongside her more recent plays.  Wilson found that “the play moves swiftly” thanks to Blain-Cruz’s direction, “and there are a number of very funny bits,” but because “most of the characters are broadly drawn and the sketch-like scenes circle around a gag or punchline, the play does not pack the wallop one might expect.”  The TB reviewer complained, “The play’s poignancy and fable-like morals come through in narration—fourth-wall breaking monologues—rather than in the actions of and interactions among individual characters.”  He had praise for the acting of Boothe and the ensemble, however, and the work of the design team, which “presents New York City’s grit, glamor, and matchless energy.”  In conclusion, Wilson found, “While it is easy to get caught up in the fast-paced, vibrant world of Fabulation, Nottage’s play presents hard truths about issues of class, race, and gender.”

Front Row Center’s Donna Herman, whose notice received Show-Score’s highest rating (90), declared, “If Lynn Nottage wrote a prescription, I’d buy a ticket—I know it’d cure what ails me.”  As she explained, “She brings razor edged clarity to everything she writes, and undeniable truth.”  In Fabulation, Herman added, the playwright also “has a gleam of fun in her eye.”  Director Blain-Cruz “has done a masterful job staging this complex piece smoothly and elegantly,” assisted by her designers.  The cast includes “a great ensemble,” but FRC’s reviewer averred, “Cherise Boothe knocks it out of the park as Undine.”  (Herman’s review was also posted on New York Theatre Guide.)

On scribicide, the site with the lowest-scoring review (60), Aaron Botwick characterized Fabulation as “fairly typical Lynne Nottage” because it “is consistently engaging and funny without ever transgressing the boundaries of conventional American theater.”  What Botwick meant was, “The action is lively and fast-moving but always safe.”  Nonetheless, the scribicide writer found, “Boothe is excellent in the title role, sharp and cynical and commanding,” though “ultimately the material is unambitious, making Fabulation an enjoyable if somewhat unremarkable evening of theater.”

Samuel L. Leiter labeled Fabulation “episodic” and its “excellent revival, vibrantly directed” at the Signature Theatre Company on his blog, Theatre’s Leiter Side.  “Moments of true feeling, even of sentimentality, now and then intrude,” reported Leiter, “but the play’s overall tone is comedy bordering on farce.”  He found the humor “cartoonish,” but he “did appreciate several sketch-like scenes.”  The TLS blogger declared, “There’s no disputing the excellence of the versatile ensemble . . . nor the splendidly realized Undine of Cherise Boothe.”  To the prospect of the rest of Signature’s Nottage season, based on this production, Leiter stated, “Fabulous.”

Jonathan Mandell of New York Theater observed that “In the hands of director Lileana Blain-Cruz, ‘Fabulation’ . . . seems to promise an over-the-top satire in the very first scene”; however, “as the play progresses, and Undine regresses, ‘Fabulation’ turns into something more clever and pointed than just broad comedy.”  Mandell explained, “If there are laughs in ‘Fabulation,’ the play thus doesn’t stray as far as it may initially seem from Nottage’s socially conscious dramas.”  The NYTheater reviewer concluded, “Like any comedy, ‘Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine’ ends on a hopeful note, perhaps even a happy one for the characters.”

Labeling Fabulation a “hard-edged picaresque fable” on TheaterScene.net, Darryl Reilly observed that Nottage “is in a lighter mood here but her comic sequences have a bracing tone and the dialogue has her customary skillful depth.”  Reilly asserted that the dramatist “gleefully depicts the shopworn situations through a solid episodic structure that predictably culminates in enlightened redemption.”  As most other reviews had, the TS.net writer lauded the designers and reported that Blain-Cruz’s “vigorous staging energizes the preponderance of clichés on display.”  He called the acting ensemble “robust” and said that they “vivaciously portray a gallery of” characters.  Reilly pronounced Boothe “ the play’s electric centerpiece.  Radiating vitality, the beaming and expressive Ms. Boothe’s breakneck performance grandly personifies the character’s defensive arrogance and touching contemplativeness.”  In sum, the review-writer concluded, “Fabulation, or The Re-Education of Undine is a lightweight fantasia dusted with a sheen of societal significance. Its high caliber theatricality puts it over as barbed entertainment.”

[I want to draw readers’ attention to a publication in which some might be interested.  Back in the spring of 2017, The Dramatist, the magazine of the Dramatists Guild of America, ran an interview with Paula Vogel and Lynn Nottage by Tari Stratton.  It was entitled “In Conversation: Lynn Nottage & Paula Vogel,” published in volume 19, number 55 (May/June 2017), and I also posted it on ROT on 7 October 2017.  ROTters who are interested in hearing more about or from Nottage are urged to find a copy of The Dramatist or scroll back to the posted version on this blog.]