Temple Theaters presents Lynn Nottage’s ‘Fabulation’

The 2004 work finds Nottage in a lighter but no less trenchant mode than Sweat (seen this season at both Philadelphia Theatre Company and People’s Light) or Ruined, for which she won Pulitzer Prizes. I actually prefer it to both plays, which tend to wear their worthiness a touch too conspicuously. In Fabulation, Nottage shows she can have a little fun while still putting across a serious message.

Wit and weight

Christopher Windom’s production communicates that message with comic precision, balancing the satirical tone of the play and the weightier questions underpinning it. Essentially a modern-day bildungsroman in reverse, Nottage charts Undine’s downward mobility and considers the mental, physical, and spiritual side effects of living inside a constructed persona.

When we first meet Undine (played here by Satchel Williams), she sits atop a boutique public-relations empire, a self-made woman in every sense of the word. Her operation “caters to the vanity and confusion of the African-American nouveau riche,” which she contrasts as an avatar of self-possession. But her hard work crumbles in an instant when her slick husband Hervé (José Raúl Mangual, deploying a wonderfully overstated accent) absconds with her fortune.

Undine’s sudden poverty thrusts her back into a world she long left in the dust: the Walt Whitman Public Housing Projects, where she grew up; the social services office; and a brief sojourn inside a jail cell. An unexpected pregnancy only complicates matters further.

Nottage mostly resists the urge to turn Undine’s tumble from the highest rung of the social ladder into a moralizing story about how the mighty can fall. Instead, she borrows a page from the 19th-century novels cheekily referenced in the play’s wordy subtitle, allowing her protagonist to deploy the smarts and spirit she's gained to help navigate her new reality. When she applies Undine’s knowledge to life as Sharona, the character fully comes into her own.

Meet the family

Along the way, Nottage introduces a lively cast of supporting characters whose eccentricities would make Dickens or Trollope proud. They include Undine’s family, two generations of proud security guards who contain multitudes beneath their identical uniforms; a grandmother with a shocking secret and heartbreaking rationale; and a high-achieving former friend who, unlike Undine, refused to neglect her roots. Doubling and tripling roles, the talented supporting cast — Scott Berkowitz, Jordan Smith, Jessica Money, Tariq Kanu, Cianno Castro, and Mariah Woods — execute the split-second shifts from persona to persona with dynamite precision. Mangual reappears as a sincere love interest for Undine, a total contrast from the louche Hervé.

Williams doesn’t quite nail the opening scene, which finds Undine in full diva mode, but her performance deepens and expands over the course of the evening. As Undine’s veneer chips off by inches, she continually finds something in the character to discover. She turns a somewhat tin-eared speech about the first moment Undine learned to deny her past into a genuinely moving moment.

Worthy of Wharton

Temple Theaters nicely husbands its limited technical resources, with subtle lighting (by Riley Woods) and smart costumes (by Hannah Compton) that sometimes suggest, rather than show, the affluence of Undine’s chosen world. Tim Pence’s unit set allows the production to move fluidly between places, and Daniel Ison’s sound design communicates Undine’s inner monologue through a series of well-chosen jams from the early aughts.

Fabulation leaves some questions unanswered and some avenues unexplored — I would have liked more focus on Undine’s complicated relationship to potential motherhood, which seems more of a side conversation than an essential element. But as a character study and an exploration of the lengths women sometimes must go for success, Nottage provides a story worthy of Edith Wharton.