[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.]
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