'FLEX'

 

[When I read the review of Candrice Jones’s FLEX in the New York Times on 25 July, I didn’t pay it much attention.  Despite Naveen Kumar’s praise (“a slam-dunk New York debut”; “the playwright Candrice Jones excels equally in sly, sitcom humor and in the swift-tongued rhythms of teenage and athletic talk”), it didn’t seem like a play that would hold my interest.

[I may have judged it on too little information.  The play, about to close its Off-Broadway première, may have more to offer, both dramatically and theatrically, than I understood.  On CBS 2 News at 6PM nine days later, Dave Carlin reported some facts about the Lincoln Center Theater production that piqued my attention, particularly that the cast plays an actual, unchoreographed basketball game on stage during the show.

[I’m posting four published articles on FLEX (which is sometimes written in upper and lower case letters, but seems to be officially written in all caps, so I’ll follow suit outside quotations) from different outlets.  Below is Carlin’s WCBS report, followed by an insider’s chronicle of the road the play took from Arkansas to New York City from American Theatre; a New York Times article on sports, especially basketball, on New York and regional stages; and an online review of the LCT production of FLEX.

[For the sake of the record, here’s the book on the play:

[FLEX was developed in the Berkeley (California) Repertory Theatre’s Ground Floor Residency between 19 June and 1 July 2018 and played the next year from 19 to 28 July at San Franciso’s Bay Area Playwrights Festival.

[Jones’s play was then selected for the Actors Theatre of Louisville’s renowned Humana Festival of New American Plays for 2020.  The COVID pandemic shut-down was instituted in March of that year, however, two days before FLEX was scheduled to open at ATL.

[A reading at the Arkansas New Play Festival at TheatreSquared in Fayetteville on 22 August 2021 served as further development and a production at TheatreSquared between 29 June and 17 July 2022 was designated as the play’s première, along with a production at the Theatrical Outfit in Atlanta from 7 September to 2 October 2022.  FLEX has had multiple productions around the country since then, including its New York première.

[Under the direction of Lileana Blain-Cruz, FLEX opened for previews in the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center, LCT’s 299-seat Off-Broadway house, on 23 June 2023; it had its press opening on 20 July and will close on 20 August. 

[Candrice Jones (b. 1981) is a Steinberg playwright and educator from Dermott, Arkansas, a small town with a population of 2,316 in Chicot County in the southeast corner of the state on the border with Mississippi.  (The Steinberg Playwright Award is given annually by the Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust to up-and-coming American playwrights with distinctive voices.)  Dermott is the model for the play’s Plainnole (Plain Ol’?), Arkansas.

[Jones has been a fellow at the literary magazine Callaloo for poetry at Brown University and in London.  She’s also been a VONA Playwriting Fellow, and CalArts MFA Critical Studies recipient.  (VONA, or Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation, is an arts organization founded in order to provide emerging writers of color with workshops and mentoring by established writers of color.)

[Jones’s primary goal, she declares, is to write love letters for and to women of the American South.  From 2014 to 2018, she produced Re-Imagining the Self, a ten-minute-play showcase hosted by Little Rock Central High National Historic Site and the Weekend Theater.  She’s the author of the full-length play Crackbaby (Wasserstein Prize Nomination [established in memory of playwright Wendy Wasserstein for an outstanding script by a young woman who hasn’t yet received national attention]).

[Jones has been a resident fellow at Ground Floor at Berkeley Rep, the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, and MacDowell in Peterborough, New Hampshire.  She’s scheduled to be a resident playwright at Djerassi Resident Artists Program in Woodside, California, in the fall of 2024.  Jones was a 2019-20 Many Voices Fellow and 2020-21 Jerome Fellow at the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis.  In 2022, she received the Celebrate! Maya Award.  Currently, Candrice Jones lives in Little Rock where she’s working on play and musical commissions.] 

“NEW PLAY ‘FLEX’ TAKES WOMEN’S BASKETBALL
FROM THE COURT TO THE STAGE”
by Dave Carlin 

[The article below was broadcast on CBS 2 News at 6PM on 3 August 2023.]

NEW YORK – High school women’s basketball is creatively brought to life in a new play at Lincoln Center.

It’s about ambition that can turn friendships foul, and the actors play the game for real on stage and must adapt the plot accordingly.

Summer youth basketball is getting propelled from the playgrounds and landing on a Lincoln Center stage in “Flex” by Candrice Jones.

“I’m having a ball on stage,” said Erica Matthews, who plays Starra Jones.

Starra is determined at all costs to rise from her high school team and go pro, but the arrival of new player, Sidney, played by Tamera Tomakili, threatens Starra.

“Sidney being there is basically her saying, you’re not going to the WNBA, and that is a hard pill for Starra to swallow,” Matthews said.

Starra plots a secret betrayal that threatens to unravel the team.

As the teammates deal with friction, a hidden romance and teen pregnancy, the actors multitask with lots of running, jumping, passing and shooting.

Depending on how the games on stage go, the script changes, and there are two endings.

But win or lose at the end, the play’s message is the same.

“This sport has brought us together because it is a communal thing, and I think that is the heart of the story, is that, at the end of the day, we need community, we need to be together in order to make kind of everyone’s dream come true,” Tomakili said.

“She still learns that no matter what, your journey is your jurney,” Matthews said. “Learning to play with the team, it isn’t always about you.”

Turning the actors into athletes was basketball consultant Amber Batchelor, of the group “Ladies Who Hoop” [“a nonprofit organization that empowers women of all ages and fosters community through the game of basketball”].

“Jumping into the theater world and being connected to this project has been the thrill of my life,” she said. “Especially some of the character work between Starra and Sidney, and those one-on-one games was really fun to choreograph . . . [.] I think each and every one of them were surprised at how quickly when you just get kind of the basics and fundamentals.”

Batchelor added, “We’re in this amazing time now, there’s a real evolution of the women’s game – not just basketball, but women’s sports as a whole . . . [.] You’re going to see a lot of women playing at all ages.”

The action on a real court or a theatrical one has the power to bring you to your feet, cheering.

“Flex” plays through Aug. 20 at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center.

*  *  *  *
“‘FLEX’: TAKING THE LADY TRAIN FROM THE ARKANSAS DELTA TO LINCOLN CENTER”
by Kim Euell 

[Kim Euell’s chronicle appeared in the Theatre Communication Group’s monthly magazine American Theatre on 12 July 2023.  As the title indicates, it traces the path of Candrice Jones’s play from background in Dermott, Arkansas, to the stage of the Mitze E. Newhouse Theater at New York City’s Lincoln Center.]

Candrice Jones’s new play about a Southern girls’ basketball team has come a long way, but it hasn’t been a layup.

Flex, Candrice Jones’s play about an ambitious girl’s high school basketball team in rural Arkansas, is on the move. In the past year, the team known as the Lady Train has journeyed from its co-world premiere at Northwest Arkansas’s Obie-winning TheatreSquared and at Atlanta’s Theatrical Outfit, and now to New York City’s Lincoln Center Theater, where it’s currently in previews, to open officially on July 20. Under the inspired direction of LCT resident director Lileana Blain-Cruz, the Lady Train’s New York debut feels almost miraculous, given the blindsiding bumps it hit along the way.

Jones’s play is set in the year 1997, the inaugural year of the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA). This momentous event beams a beacon of hope to a group of young Arkansas women, who see winning their state tournament as a ticket out of a dead-end existence in a town where the options are working in a spice factory or at local prisons, or enlisting in the military. But before these young women can get to state, they must overcome a formidable obstacle—i.e., a star player is pregnant, and the coach does not allow pregnant girls to play.

Flex’s developmental journey began when Candrice brought an early draft into a playwriting workshop I conducted for Voices of the Nation (a.k.a. VONA) in the summer of 2017. VONA produces the country’s only multi-genre writing conference specifically for writers of color. Our dramaturgical collaboration continued after the workshop into the following summer, when Flex was among the roster of plays developed at Berkeley Rep’s Ground Floor Residency. In 2019, Flex was at the Bay Area Playwright’s Festival prior to being selected for the 2020 Humana Festival at Actors Theatre of Louisville.

In Louisville, the cast worked with a professional coach on polishing their basketball skills (as they would do years later in New York), in addition to rehearsing their roles with the play’s director. But two days prior to Flex’s anticipated world premiere, ATL suspended all performances due to COVID-19. Given the intense rehearsal schedule and the demands of tech, the reality of the enveloping pandemic had not penetrated the productions’ bubble—until it burst. When the cast gathered on Mar. 18, 2020, at a downtown Louisville restaurant, to celebrate director Delicia Turner-Sonnenberg’s birthday, the celebration felt more like a wake.

This shutdown was especially hard on Candrice, as the Humana premiere would have marked her first full production as a playwright. As the months passed, she busied herself writing and developing new scripts. Eventually she was contacted by Dexter Singleton, director of play development at Fayetteville’s TheatreSquared. He wished to develop the script at the Arkansas New Play Festival, and, if all went well, to premiere the play the following summer (with Turner-Sonnenberg back as director).

Arkansas is ranked the second poorest state in the nation, just behind neighboring Mississippi. So I was somewhat taken aback upon arriving at the award-winning modern architectural facility that houses TheatreSquared. Artistic director Robert Ford and executive director Martin Miller had leveraged the resources to build a stunning wish-list facility with two state-of-the-art performance spaces on the ground level, and a flexible rehearsal and performance space upstairs. Remarkably, TheatreSquared managed to continue producing a full season even as the pandemic raged.

On the day of the new-play festival’s staged reading of Flex in summer 2021, it played to a large, enthusiastic (masked) audience in attendance. At the conclusion of the reading’s talkback, one audience member shouted, “Let’s take this train all the way to New York!” Prophetic words indeed.

Fast forward to the spring 2023. As part of the dramaturgical research for the Lincoln Center Theater production, I’m taking a road trip to the playwright’s hometown of Dermott, Ark., to see how it informed her play. The plan is to rendezvous with Candrice in Little Rock, then set off to Dermott the following morning. Candrice calls to remind me that Fayetteville, which is a well-resourced university town, is “a bubble,” warning me of “sundown towns” I will be passing through, where I should not stop under any circumstances. “Travel with a full tank of gas,” she intones. I am heading out of the Ozarks into the Deep South.

Along the freeway I spot some curious signs. One points out the road to the town of Toad Suck. Large billboards feature Donald Trump, standing alongside a uniformed military officer, warning against the use of electronic balloting machines. (They all say “President Trump,” as though he is still in the White House. Time warp.)

One of the reasons I feel compelled to visit Dermott is because I have been told repeatedly that the Arkansas Delta, where Flex is set, is nothing like Fayetteville, my only Arkansas point of reference. I am also aware that major cultural icons hail from the Delta region: Sister Rosetta Tharpe (whose music is featured in the production), Johnny Cash, Basketball Hall of Famer Scottie Pippin, and playwright Endesha Ida Mae Holland.

During my time in Dermott (pop. 1973 and shrinking), Candrice drives us to many of the locations referenced in the play. We pass the Piggly-Wiggly on our way into town, and we drive by the Morris-Booker Community College, now permanently closed. There are two prisons in the area, a federal and a state facility. We drive in search of dirt basketball courts, only to discover that they have now all been paved over.

Having read that the Delta encompasses the state’s highest concentration of poverty, I quickly deduce that rural poverty does not necessarily resemble urban poverty. There are no unhoused people and no panhandlers to be seen. But the markers of prosperity and development that were so visible in Fayetteville are glaringly absent. Motels, grocery stores, and restaurants are in short supply. Abandoned houses are noticeable, their roofs caving in from lack of upkeep.

On the plus side, the Delta is a treat for the senses, as the soothing sounds of crickets and chirping birds fill the air. Heading out of downtown, I inhale the smell of the rich, dark soil visible in the wide open fields under limitless blue skies. We in the Dirty South, y’all! This is the region that inspired a Kesselring Award-winning play.

On our final day we visited Dermott’s public school, whose campus encompasses kindergarten through grade 12. Candrice’s entire senior class comprised 25 students. Entering through the front doors, we pass through hallways lined with glass cases full of trophies. The gymnasium walls are adorned with individual life-sized banners of uniformed male and female basketball players. Groups of eighth graders file in for physical education and immediately begin shooting baskets.

Candrice engages with a group of girls, asking them their family names, then telling them whose aunt or cousin she played on the team with. While this is happening, one of the girls begins nonchalantly spinning the basketball on the tip of her index finger, Harlem Globetrotter-style. This is when it fully dawns on me how deeply ingrained basketball culture is in this town.

For our visit, we stay in the gracious two-story home where Candrice and her siblings grew up. Railroad tracks border the expansive backyard. It is this proximity that inspired Candrice to name the team in the play the Lady Train. An apt name it turned out to be for the journey that was to come.

Candrice has done a masterful job of maximizing every opportunity to further develop the script. At TheatreSquared, when the final shot that determined the outcome of the championship game was taken, the stage went to black. When the lights came up audiences saw the Lady Train holding their trophy.

At Lincoln Center Theater, by contrast, the audience follows the championship game action quarter by quarter as though they are at courtside. And when the final shot is taken, hit or miss, it determines how the play ends for that performance. When I attended one of the two performances that ended with a “loss,” I was impressed to see that the losing ending was equally if not more moving than the “win.” 

Blain-Cruz is an ideal director for this play because of her highly physical approach to staging. She begins each rehearsal with movement and utilizes bumping dance music as an energizer when needed. “I do not underestimate the amount of focus, concentration, and stamina that this show takes—bravo!” she told the actors after their first full run-through.

Flex may be best understood as Candrice’s love letter to women of the rural South. One homage that would be recognizable only to residents of the Delta is the story that the Lady Train’s coach tells about winning the state championship with only four girls on the court. Candrice told me that this is in fact a true story—a feat accomplished by Gloria Harris, legendary coach of the Delta Lady Pirates.

In addition to basketball, the music in Flex provides another portal of entry into the world of the play. Songs like Montell Jordan’s “This Is How We Do It,” Kurtis Blow’s “Basketball,” Aliyah’s “Are You That Somebody,” and Xscape’s “Just Kickin’ It” transport me back to the ’90s, when I joined the artistic staff of the Tony-winning Hartford Stage in Connecticut. I accepted the position of director of play development to help open the door for underrepresented writers in American theatre. (I knew of only one other person of color in a similar position at a mainstream theatre at the time). Back then, the plays being produced by writers of color in mainstream theatres at the time were typically works that would not challenge the subscriber audience’s assumptions about minority cultures. I knew there were much more impactful stories that were being overlooked and writers who were falling through the cracks.

Working closely at Hartford Stage with then artistic director Mark Lamos and resident director Bart Sher (currently resident director at Lincoln Center Theater) we succeeded in attracting the audience that every regional theatre claimed they wanted—one that reflected the diversity of its community. We had all ages, races and backgrounds on our stages and in our seats. I’ve often referred to my time at Hartford as my “Camelot” moment. And like the legendary Camelot, it didn’t last.

Riding the Lady Train into Lincoln Center has been a particularly satisfying experience for me, as it bookends the work I started at Hartford Stage. Candrice Jones exemplifies a compellingly authentic voice, staging facets of Black Southern life not widely seen on American stages until now. I doubt that this production could have happened as recently as five years ago. For one thing, Blain-Cruz, who chose to direct it, has only been a resident director at Lincoln Center Theater since 2020. As in the play, the winds of change are blowing. Let us see how far they can take us.

[Kim Euell is an Ashland/Bay Area-based playwright, dramaturg, and educator who teaches theater and film courses at the University of Southern Oregon.  She’s the co-dramaturg for FLEX at Lincoln Center Theater.]

*  *  *  *
“PLAYWRIGHTS WITH HOOP DREAMS”
by Sopan Deb 

[The article below appeared in the “Arts & Leisure” section of the New York Times of 23 July 2023.]

In Inua Ellams’s new play, “The Half-God of Rainfall” [New York Theatre Workshop (Off-Broadway), 31 July-21 August 2023], the gods play thunderous games of basketball in the heavens. For Candrice Jones’s “Flex,” high schoolers practice their defensive stances while scraping by in rural Arkansas. Near the end of Rajiv Joseph’s “King James” [Manhattan Theatre Club (Off-Broadway; co-produced with Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Chicago), 16 May-18 June 2023], the two main characters play a one-on-one game of basketball using a crumpled up piece of paper after waxing poetic about the greatness of the N.B.A. star LeBron James.

Basketball hasn’t just been on the playgrounds of New York City this summer. Hoop dreams are also playing out onstage, highlighting a theater, ahem, crossover that has become more pronounced in recent years.

While basketball is not as popular as, say, American football, its cultural reach surpasses that of other American team sports because its players are among the most publicly recognizable. (Three of the 10 highest-paid athletes in the world, when including endorsements and other off-field endeavors, according to Forbes, are N.B.A. players.)

“Watching a basketball game is the same excitement I get from watching great theater,” said Taibi Magar, the director of “The Half-God of Rainfall.” “It’s like embodied conflict. It’s executed by highly skilled performers. When you’re watching Broadway, you feel just like you’re watching N.B.A. performers.”

For Joseph, who grew up in Cleveland, basketball is the most culturally important sport partly because so many international stars play in the N.B.A., like the Denver Nuggets’s Nikola Jokic, who is Serbian, and the Milwaukee Bucks’s Giannis Antetokounmpo, who’s from Greece.

“It’s drawing from every place on the planet, which means that the sport has become a really important athletic pursuit globally,” said Joseph, whose play “King James” just ended its run at New York City Center.

And basketball’s prevalence in pop culture — including in the worlds of hip-hop and fashion and more recently in film and television — has also penetrated the theater space. Dwyane Wade, who retired from the N.B.A. in 2019, was among the producers of the Broadway shows “American Son” [Booth Theatre (Broadway), 4 November 2018-27 January 2019] and “Ain’t No Mo’” [Joseph Papp Public Theater (Off-Broadway), 27 March-5 May 2019; Belasco Theatre (Broadway), 1-23 Dec 2022].

“Even if one hasn’t played on a team or hasn’t played organized ball, we all have access to basketball,” Jones, who wrote “Flex,” said in a recent interview. “You go in any hood or any small town, someone has created a basketball goal.”

In casting “Flex,” which is in previews at the Lincoln Center Theater’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, prospective actors recorded themselves playing basketball as part of the audition process. Jones and the show’s director, Lileana Blain-Cruz, who both played basketball in high school, said they wanted the basketball being played onstage to look authentic.

“People have different styles, different ways of shooting, different personalities, different kinds of swagger,” Blain-Cruz said. “We care about the individual in the role that they play and how they’re playing it. And I think that aligns itself to theater.”

Jones’s play, set in rural Arkansas, tells the story of a girl’s high school basketball team in 1998, which aligned with the second year of the W.N.B.A. So as the audition process advanced, the actors were asked to dribble, shoot and do layups for the creative team. Once the cast was set, some rehearsals weren’t about staging at all: The cast had basketball practice at nearby John Jay College.

“There’s a kind of ensemble quality to it,” Blain-Cruz said about the sport. “Like an ensemble of actors playing together, a team of basketball players performing together. Together, they create the event.”

Minutes later, as Lauryn Hill’s “Doo Wop (That Thing)” blared, Blain-Cruz led a warm-up with the cast that included hip openers and upward arm stretches. It could have doubled as pregame preparation. The set itself had a basketball hoop hanging in the rear, and a basketball court painted on the floor. “Flex” refers to a type of play basketball teams run, and the staged work features several instances of game play.

“There’s a real rigor. It is real,” Blain-Cruz said. “That’s what’s so satisfying, I think, about sports onstage. There’s an honesty to it, right? Dribbling the ball is actually dribbling the ball. We’re not performing the idea of dribbling the ball.”

After a recent outing to a New York Liberty game, the actress Erica Matthews, whose character, Starra Jones, is the 17-year-old point guard of the fictional team, said watching the players reminded her of watching live theater.

“Basketball is very intimate. You can play a one-on-one game in a small amount of space,” Matthews said. “They’re actually performing on a stage and with the way the audience is surrounding them, the way they’re cheering, it’s basically storytelling.”

Downtown at the New York Theater Workshop, Ellams’s “The Half-God of Rainfall,” a Dante-inspired “contemporary epic” about a half-Greek god named Demi who becomes the biggest star in the N.B.A., is in previews and is scheduled to open July 31. While “Flex” deals with down-to-earth issues, such as teen pregnancy, “The Half-God of Rainfall” transports basketball to a mythical world for immortals to deal with.

At a recent rehearsal, cast members pantomimed slow motion basketball movements at the direction of the choreographer, Orlando Pabotoy. The actors Jason Bowen and Patrice Johnson Chevannes worked on setting up a proper screen, and Bowen later practiced a Michael Jordan impersonation — complete with the tongue wagging. (Jordan is referenced in the play.)

As Ellams and Magar, the show’s director, looked on from desks cluttered with tiny inflatable basketballs, they worked on reallocating lines as the choreography required. Though this version of Ellams’s poem has a cast of seven, he said it can be staged with as many or as few performers as the production desires. (A 2019 production at the Birmingham Repertory Theater in England had only two actors.)

Ellams, a Nigerian poet and playwright, who has played basketball since he was a teenager, said he created the character Demi to “do all the things that I never could” on the court. He mused that basketball has a greater draw to the stage because it is “a far more beautiful sport.”

“There’s something humbling and mortal about basketball in the sense that there’s a simple equation,” Ellams said. “The ball bounces; it comes back up to your palm. You can break that down. This is solitariness, which invites the blues and what it means to play the blues. There’s a longing.”

“There’s a natural melancholy about it,” he added, which makes it “easier to pair with the human spirit.”

Of course there have been other basketball-related plays. In 2012, “Magic/Bird” [Longacre Theatre (Broadway), 11 April-12 May 2012] explored the friendship and rivalry between the 1980s basketball stars Magic Johnson and Larry Bird on Broadway. The 2011 Broadway musical “Lysistrata Jones” [Walter Kerr Theatre (Broadway), 14 December 2011-8 January 2012], inspired by Aristophanes’s “Lysistrata,” followed a group of cheerleaders who withhold sex from their boyfriends on the basketball team because they keep losing games. Lauren Yee’s 2018 Off Broadway play, “The Great Leap” [Atlantic Theater Company (Off-Broadway), 23 May-24 June 2018] also directed by Magar, tells the story of a teenage basketball prodigy who travels to China in 1989 to play in an exhibition game between college teams from Beijing and San Francisco.

Daryl Morey, now an executive with the N.B.A.’s Philadelphia 76ers, commissioned a musical comedy called “Small Ball” [Catastrophic Theatre, 6 April-13 May 2018] that played in Houston in 2018. It depicts a fictional character named Michael Jordan — not the Jordan — as he finds himself playing in an international league with teammates who are six inches tall.

“I think basketball is just the most important of all of the sports among the up-and-coming directors and playwrights, at least the ones I’ve spoken to,” Morey said.

Not that basketball has a lock on the theater. Baseball has long been an object of fascination for playwrights, including classic shows like “Damn Yankees” [46th Street Theatre/Adelphi Theatre (original Broadway première), 5 May 1955-12 October 1957]. Richard Greenberg’s Tony-winning 2003 play, “Take Me Out” [Joseph Papp Public Theater (Off-Broadway), 5 September-24 November 2002; Walter Kerr Theatre (Broadway première), 27 February 2003-4 January 2004], about a baseball player who comes out as gay, had a Tony-winning revival on Broadway last year.  In 2019, “Toni Stone” [Roundabout Theatre Company (Off-Broadway), 20 June-11 August 2019], written by Lydia R. Diamond, depicted the life of Marcenia Lyle Stone [1921-96], who became the first woman to play in a men’s baseball league when she took the field for the Indianapolis Clowns in the Negro Leagues [25 April 1953].

Football and boxing, too: “Lombardi” [Circle in the Square Theatre (Broadway), 21 October 2010-22 May 2011], a biographical play based on the life of the legendary football coach Vince Lombardi [1913-70], ran on Broadway in 2010, and 2014 brought a stage adaptation of “Rocky” [Winter Garden Theatre (Broadway), 13 March-17 August 2014], the famous 1976 underdog boxing film, to Broadway.

But for the moment, it is basketball that is having a renaissance in theater. Or to put it in basketball terms, playwrights who take on the sport currently have the hot hand.

[Sopan Deb is a basketball writer and a contributor to the Culture section of the New York Times. Before joining the Times, he covered Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign for CBS News.]

 *  *  *  *
“REVIEW: IN FLEX, FRIENDSHIP FOULS CONSUME
A HIGH SCHOOL WOMEN’S BASKETBALL TEAM”
by Hayley Levitt 

[Hayley Levitt’s review of FLEX was posted on the website TheaterMania on 20 July 2023.]

Candrice Jones’s nostalgic play about teenage hope and ambition makes its New York premiere at Lincoln Center Theater.

It’s 1998 in Plainnole, Arkansas, the WNBA has just entered the zeitgeist, and the members of the Lady Train high school basketball team have gone to extreme measures to keep their starting lineup (and hopeful futures) intact: No sex until they bring home the state championship.

It’s a very Lysistrata opening to Candrice Jones’s sports-centric play Flex — now at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater — but the comparisons end there. For one thing, the celibacy pact has been breached before the show even begins (the cycle of senior athletes in provincial Plainnole being sidelined by unwanted pregnancy can’t be so easily broken). And more importantly, the pact has nothing to do with boys. Sure, it’s the boys who get these talented young Black women pregnant, but the players’ loyalties are to one another and their ambitions are their own.

The internal struggle between loyalty and ambition is the central conflict for Starra, played with unshakable confidence and remarkable athleticism by Erica Matthews. She’s the star(ra) of the Lady Train, but her supremacy is threatened by Sidney (an amusingly brash performance by Tamera Tomakili), a California transplant who is presumed glamorous upon arrival— and not entirely unfairly, considering that her Division 1 college scouts have followed her to the boonies of Arkansas.

It’s an opportunity Starra (whose late mother also lost out on recruitment opportunities) would do just about anything to have herself. And she takes anything shockingly far, much to the chagrin of her other teammates — particularly her sweet-natured and extremely religious cousin Cherise (a hilarious Ciara Monique whose performance resists trite archetypes). It’s a move so outrageous, it almost overshadows the other central story line: the collective pursuit of an abortion for their teammate April (an excellent Brittany Bellizeare), which, in between horrific conversations about sexual trauma and the dearth of access to healthcare in the South (Jones’s version of 1998 is looking 2023 dead in the face), turns into a charming road trip comedy (Renita Lewis, as the queer-coded Donna, delivers some of the show’s best deadpan comedy from the driver’s seat of set designer Matt Saunders’s jigsaw puzzle of a car).

Flex trades in the same camaraderie and female friendship that made A League of Their Own a beacon for every female athlete, with doses of teen drama and ’90s nostalgia to lock in the allegiance of every elder millennial (costume designer Mika Eubanks’s vests, baggy button-ups, and bucket hats are spot-on). In stories like these, characters are the key to success, and characters are clearly Jones’s strength as a writer. For each of these girls, the stakes feel high and authentic to this slice of American life — but director Lileana Blain-Cruz maintains a levity throughout that all but ensures a classic happy ending at a championship game where life lessons coalesce into a poetic expression of teamwork. [For the novices in sports-ball vernacular, the Flex offense demands a lot of passing and takes players out of their traditional roles. You can see where this metaphor is headed.]

Flex certainly invites comparison to Sarah DeLappe’s successful ensemble play, The Wolves, which followed the complex politics of a girls’ soccer team. However, where The Wolves buried tension and darkness beneath a shell of inane chatter, Flex wears its drama on its sleeve and cushions it all in the safety of a traditional story arc. There’s also the added buffer of Coach Francine (Christiana Clark, mastering a coach’s cadence of tough love), who, despite her unfair blanket rule against playing pregnant girls, takes on the uncomplicated persona of “stable adult” — the kind of cozy character perhaps better suited for a television miniseries than a play that aims for complexity.

The most tension-generating part of Flex is the actual basketball that Blain-Cruz has her cast play onstage (Saunders turns the Newhouse Theater into a fully functional basketball court). Plot points depend on actors hitting shots — particularly Matthews, who incredibly sinks a three-pointer to button one of her Act 1 monologues (if you were wondering, The Wolves had zero soccer-ing). It’s one of the riskiest moves I’ve ever seen attempted in live theater and the payoff is an entire audience holding its collective breath and celebrating the ecstasy of victory. With that kind of pressure, even an expected ending gets an infusion of suspense.

[Hayley Levitt is a New York-based theater journalist with experience in Broadway and Off-Broadway criticism, interviews and profiles, feature writing, and reporting for both camera and print.]  

'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.]