Chautauqua Theater Company Guest Artist Sharina Martin performs as Undine during a tech rehearsal of Lynn Nottage’s Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine in Bratton Theater.
Lynn Nottage has been writing plays for nearly her entire life; she created her first full-length play, The Darker Side of Verona, while she was in high school.
A MacArthur “Genius” Fellow and celebrated playwright and screenwriter, Nottage was the first — and remains the only — woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice, in 2009 for her play Ruined and in 2017 for Sweat.
Much of Nottage’s work focuses on telling the stories of working-class people, particularly people of the working class who are Black, and those themes are central to the world of Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine.
“When you begin writing, you begin in a place of what is known,” Nottage said. “I’m a Black woman who grew up in a family of very hardworking people who were the children of hardworking people, so I think that I gravitated toward the stories that were closest to me.”
Fabulation, Chautauqua Theater Company’s second mainstage production of the summer, is the story of Undine Barnes Calles (played by Guest Artist Sharina Martin in CTC’s production), a Black woman who has built a successful life for herself and runs a public relations firm in New York City. After she discovers her husband has stolen all of her money, and that she is pregnant, she returns home to her working-class family in Brooklyn, facing her past and reconnecting with her roots.
CTC’s run of Nottage’s Fabulation concludes this weekend, with performances at 4 p.m. Saturday and 2:30 p.m. Sunday in Bratton Theater.
Fabulation, Nottage said, is a companion piece to Intimate Apparel, which was produced at Chautauqua in 2015 under former producing artistic director Vivienne Benesch’s direction.
Inspired by the character Esther, a lonely Black seamstress in New York at the start of the 20th century navigating the world’s perception of her race and class, Nottage wanted to write a story set a century later that captured a woman trying to take control of her life and identity — and that’s how Fabulation blossomed.
“When I was writing Intimate Apparel, I tried to imagine, ‘What would happen to a woman a hundred years later who felt fully empowered, and who felt that she had the tools to shift her narrative, to fabulate?’ How would she use that power?” Nottage said. “Hence came the character Undine Barnes Calles, who grew up in a working-class family, but her ambition sort of corrupted her.”
A majority of the play’s characters came from Nottage’s imagination and people from her life, and Undine was inspired by a story someone told her about their experience being one of the only Black students in their class at Dartmouth College, and the “mixture of emotions” he felt in that environment.
“That story really helped me shape Undine,” she said. “I was very interested in someone who was successful, ambitious and reaching beyond their family, and who ended up having to make very compromised choices and morally ambiguous choices. That’s sort of the foundation of the character of Undine; someone who is a little bit wicked, a little bit funny and a little bit endearing.”
After writing Intimate Apparel, a play that required much more research for its story and characters, the writing process for Fabulation was comparatively easy. She envisioned a play that quickly moved from scene to scene, and that idea is clear in the fast-paced plot.
“I really wanted that to be the flow of the piece, so you almost don’t feel like you can breathe until the end when Undine finally takes that exhale,” she said. “When I was writing the play, I really tried to mimic, in the ways in which I approach my craft and my process, the way in which the play is structured.”
When the show first premiered off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons in 2004 and developed with assistance from the Sundance Institute Theatre Laboratory, it was Nottage’s first time working collaboratively on the production, as she worked directly with the cast and team to “play in the sandbox” and explore the characters’ personalities on stage. In some ways, she said, Fabulation was shaped by some of the actors’ voices and impulses.
Not being involved in that process at Chautauqua, Nottage isn’t aware of the voices, impulses and interpretations of the cast in Bratton. But, she said, that’s what makes her job as a playwright especially thrilling.
“That’s one of the glories of being a playwright; theater is a dynamic form as it continues to shift and mold depending on the ingredients, whereas other mediums like film and television, once they’re shaped, they’re done,” she said.
Through Undine’s journey of rediscovering her roots, satire and dark comedy play a pivotal role in examining stereotypes, family, and socioeconomic status.
By using comedy and satire, Nottage wanted to explore what W.E.B. Du Bois called the “double consciousness” and duality of being Black in America.
“Yes, the play is funny, but it’s also looking at the ways in which we have to negotiate race and class in order to survive, and that’s one of the things that I was very interested in,” she said. “The ways in which we code-shift and the ways in which we’re asked to interface with our own identities, which is this double consciousness, was at the core of what I wanted to explore when I was writing the play.”
As Nottage reflects on her career as a leading voice in Black American theater, she said she is grateful to still be doing what she loves — writing stories that matter to her and to her audiences.
“I just feel really proud that, after all these years, I’m still in the business,” she said. “I think that it’s really hard to make a life in the arts and I think it’s doubly hard to make a life as a playwright. I feel really proud that, all these years later, I can still find spaces that will invite me to tell my stories.”
