From left to right: Sarah Purvis '24, Liz Almonte '24, and Mae Philippe-Auguste '24. Photo by Francesca Marie FP '22
By Ella White ’22
News Editor
For one Black student in the Mount Holyoke film, media and theater department, it was “a dream to be able to work on a play like this and design for actors who looked like her,” visiting lecturer Michael Ofori said. The FMT department held performances of its production of American playwright Lynn Nottage’s “Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine” from Oct. 21 through 24. This was the department’s first in-person production since the beginning of the pandemic, and the performance was held in Rooke Theater, with seating at 75 percent capacity.
The play stars a successful Black female publicist, Undine, who realizes her husband has left her and disappeared, taking all her money. Her carefully built life then dissembles: she loses her business, her home and her friends. She only experiences more anxiety when she suffers a panic attack right before realizing she is pregnant. And then, stemming from all of those stressors, she must move in with her estranged family — whom she has not seen in 14 years — who live in socialized public housing projects.
“Fabulation” is part of the FMT department’s work to diversify and commit to anti-racist values, according to Ofori’s director’s note. In an interview, Ofori said the department was “able to create opportunities just by selecting this play.” The theater performed “Intimate Apparel” by Nottage in 2016, but the revisitation of her work now is an attempt to broaden the playwrights used by the department and casting opportunities for students. In the past five years, the majority of Rooke productions have been written by white playwrights.
“[We’re] putting ourselves on a path towards attracting a diverse cast. By extension, that cast invites their friends, their family and eventually this place does not displace,” Ofori said. “The net becomes wider, [so], the pool of people we can attract becomes wider.”
“It’s providing more [opportunities for] students of color,” Geraldine Louis ’24, who played Undine’s mother, friend and a young pregnant woman, said. “But I feel like there’s also that thought process that I had — did they only want me because I’m Black or because of the talent that I have?”
Louis said the play still interested her, regardless of why she was cast. “[Because of] the fact that it was surrounded by a Black lead,” Louis said, “it was more appealing to me.”
According to visiting lecturer in film, media and theater Heidi Holder, who wrote the dramaturgical note for the production, Undine “takes her place in a long line of Americans bent on re-inventing themselves.” From the beginning, Undine is a character who has already reinvented herself, and the play, in a slight reversal on this trope Holder notes, follows her unraveling that reinvention.
Undine sets herself apart from this traditional narrative, Ofori said, in that “she’s not actively trying to reconnect with herself. She is made to. Everything in the universe is saying to her, ‘You can’t keep going down the path that you’re on. You need to return home.’”
The play is about money, Blackness and identity. In order to maintain her power, Undine must maintain a careful image, projecting wealth and control. Liz Almonte ’24 played Undine as a tightly-wound woman who punches down — yelling for her assistant or belittling her brother — to protect the semblance of her identity, even when she has lost everything.
Despite this strong, assertive front, Undine addresses the audience throughout the play, sharing her anxieties with them. As the play progresses, Undine becomes increasingly vulnerable; she agrees to a date with an unlikely suitor, voices fewer criticisms of those around her, holds the hand of a pregnant woman in the women’s clinic and admits that she, too, is afraid of her pregnancy.
Reflecting Undine, the play is also vulnerable. Many of the transitions done by the stage crew were performed with the lights up, not allowing anything to be hidden from the audience.
The backdrop was a concrete wall and elevator doors that gave the stage a sense of bareness and frigidity. “Undine was the only permanent fixture in this play, and everything and everyone else had to revolve around her,” Ofori said, of the purpose of the set design. While Undine remains on stage the entirety of the play, everything else is in flux.
Throughout all Undine’s tumult, though, the show remains lighthearted and fun.
“It was really nice to see a positive take on a Black story,” Georgia Rose ’25, self-reportedly one of two white members of the cast, said. “Obviously, Undine wasn’t the best person to begin with, but she went through this transformation into a really wonderful person, and it was a comedy, and it was really funny; whereas a lot of media portrays … Black women as [having] a tragic story.”
Nottage wrote the play, according to Ofori, as “an exhale.”
“That resonated with me a lot, especially considering the time that we’re doing this play,” Ofori said. “Felt like we all needed to take a big breath.”
As the play arrives at its conclusion, “tak[ing] a big breath” is exactly what the characters of “Fabulation” advise Undine to do. And in agreeing to try romance again, coming to terms with her family and accepting that she will have her baby, Undine breathes.