theater review

Oh, to be Undine Barnes! The heroine of Lynn Nottage's intriguing but uneven play has it all. Married to Hervé, a smooth Latin playboy, Undine is also an entrepreneur, the head of her own Manhattan-based, African-American PR firm. She's black, she's beautiful, and she has it all.

Not for long. When Hervé disappears with Undine's money, she's in a pickle. You see, her Fabulousness is Fabulated. This Dartmouth-educated success story actually grew up in a Brooklyn tenement, an early history she conveniently deep-sixed by allowing the world to think her family perished in a fire. Even Undine's name is fake (she was born Sharona Watkins).

Nottage's play suggests that while a white woman in Undine's position might weather the storm (through help from family and friends, perhaps), when a self-invented black woman is dethroned the fall is precipitous. Undine finds herself back in Brooklyn with her mother, father, brother and grandmother (they are, respectively, three security guards and a wheelchair-bound heroin addict), who haven't the means to help her and seem to secretly enjoy her comeuppance.

Fabulation is deliberately episodic—the subtitle suggests an 18th-century picaresque novel—and some of the episodes crackle with good dialogue and dramatic substance. There's drug counseling (Undine isn't actually an addict, but… never mind), a hellish trip to Social Services, a date with someone who might actually be nice.

But the play is even bumpier than Undine's own wild ride. Nottage's script is all over the place, veering from a comedy of manners to social realism; there's even a brief and annoying excursion into Imitation Of Life-like bathos. Does the playwright believe that Undine's reversal of fortune is tragic, deserved, inevitable, or all of the above? Hard to tell.

In any case, it would be a real trick to make the whole piece cohere. Abigail Adams' production is initially pitched as a farce, with lots of broad overacting. There are a few terrific cameos (Cathy Simpson as a bored receptionist), but for the major characters, it's a mistake. We're alienated too early, and have a hard time tracing their journey from stereotypes to real people. This is particularly a problem with Chantal Jean-Pierre (Undine), who has some lovely quiet moments alongside some irritating shrill ones.

Still, this is an able ensemble, and PL&T's sleekly mounted production is a chance to see the work of an important new playwright. (Note that Nottage's Intimate Apparel, written at the same time as Fabulation, is featured later in the season at the Philadelphia Theatre Company).

Fabulation, Or The Re-Education Of Undine

Through Feb. 19, People's Light & Theatre Company, 39 Conestoga Rd., Malvern, Pa., 610-647-1900