In the rags-to-riches-and-back-again satire Fabulation Or, The Re-Education of Undine, an absorbing Mosaic Theater Company production now playing at the Atlas Performing Arts Center, the title character learns that, when it comes to the American Dream, what goes up may also come crashing down.
Undine Barnes Calles (the first-rate Felicia Curry) is a modern-day Jay Gatsby in active freefall. Born Sharona Watkins, she’s a black woman who once fled her working-class Brooklyn upbringing in early adolescence to eventually attend Dartmouth, adopt a new persona, and establish a successful PR firm in Manhattan (which serves “the vanity and confusion of the African American nouveau riche”). But our fabulist of a protagonist, who starts as a remade power-woman, soon finds herself broke, pregnant, and back to square one.
“I think I’ve officially returned to the underclass,” Undine laments to the audience after discovering her suave Argentine husband Hervé (Carlos Saldaña) has emptied their joint accounts and left her alone with child. What follows is a parade of indignities (in her eyes) that brings Undine back to her childhood home, marches her through jail and into drug counseling and, worst of all, plops her into the hellscape of a social services office. All these scenes unfold like karmic payback from playwright Lynn Nottage (a two-time Pulitzer winner) for Undine’s mortal sin and central fabrication: wiping her poor family from existence out of embarrassment, by claiming they’d been killed in a fire.
Undine’s darkest biographical shame becomes the source of her contrition and second rebirth, that titular “re-education.” Felicia Curry shoulders the burden with brio—it’s a fabulous performance, well worth the price of admission. Her seven ensemble castmates, who portray multiple characters from one brief vignette to the next, are almost as impressive. Kevin E. Thorne II (who has a star-turn late into the second act) and Saldaña (who shifts gears from slimy to dreamy on a dime) are auxiliary standouts, but Aakhu TuahNera Freeman (most notable as Undine’s heroin-addicted grandma) and Roz White (ditto as her oblivious mother) both shine throughout.
Director Eric Ruffin adds elements of the ring shout, a dance-like ritual first practiced by enslaved Africans in the Americas, to each of the play’s transitions. This motif, which features rhythmic handclaps and foot-stomps, deepens the meaning of Undine’s homecoming. It makes the return to her roots all the more visceral and vibrant. Undine enters Fabulation as a character, the yuppie harpy, and exits as the humane and humbled Sharona, herself.
Fabulation from Mosaic Theater Company runs at the Atlas Performing Arts Center through Sept. 22. Tickets $20-$65. Runtime approximately 2 hours with one intermission.
