Lantern Theater Company Presents Lynn Nottage's FABULATION in June

Lantern Theater Company will conclude its 2021/22 Mainstage Season of live performances with the Philadelphia premiere of Fabulation, or The Re-Education of Undine by two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage. Making her Lantern directorial debut, Amina Robinson helms a cast of Philadelphia actors in a true ensemble production, with eight actors playing nearly 30 roles.

In their primary roles, the cast includes Angela Bey as Undine, Tanesha M. Ford as Grandma, Marchael Giles as Flow, Kash Goins as Father, Gregory Isaac as Addict, Kishia Nixon as Stephie, Ebony Pullum as Mother, and Zach Valdez as Hervé. Fabulation, or The Re-Education of Undine runs Thursday, June 2 through Sunday, June 26, 2022, at St. Stephen's Theater, the Lantern's resident venue; a complete schedule of performances and audience enrichment events is included in the fact sheet below.

To ensure a safe and comfortable return to live performances, all audience members will be required to present proof of full Covid-19 vaccination and a corresponding photo ID for entry. Everyone other than the actors on stage will also be required to wear properly fitted masks at all times.

Set in present-day New York City, Fabulation, or The Re-Education of Undine tells the story of Undine, a woman who has it all - success, love, and a fabulous wardrobe. When her husband Hervé disappears with all of her money and Undine discovers she is pregnant, she is forced to move back in with her family and return to a life she has long left behind. This funny and moving story follows Undine's riches-to-rags journey through legal misunderstandings, misplaced court-mandated addiction counseling, and the bureaucracy of the American social services and healthcare systems. With biting satirical hilarity, Nottage's masterful writing explores what it means to lose everything, to be a woman living in poverty in modern-day America, and the wisdom and self-knowledge that comes from confronting uncomfortable personal truths.

Lantern Theater Company will delve into Fabulation, or The Re-Education of Undine on its Lantern Searchlight blog, available online at lanterntheater.org/searchlight. Articles will be published weekly throughout the production's run, exploring the extraordinary range of playwright Lynn Nottage's works and inspirations, behind the scenes interviews with the creative artists, and more.

Tickets for Fabulation, or The Re-Education of Undine start at $25 and are available online at www.lanterntheater.org or by calling the Lantern Box Office at (215) 829-0395. Discounts are available for students, seniors 65 and up, U.S. military personnel, and groups of 10 or more. All performances of Fabulation, or The Re-Education of Undine will take place at St. Stephen's Theater, located at 923 Ludlow Street in Center City Philadelphia.

About the Artists

The Fabulation playwright is one of today's most prolific, most empathetic, and most surprising writers. Nottage's illustrious career spans comedy, drama, and plays that live in between the two, and her work is always deeply grounded in place and circumstance. She is the first - and remains the only - woman to have won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice. Nottage writes beautifully in a wide variety of styles; she does not have one kind of story or one way to tell them. Her wide-ranging curiosity leads her to write on an astonishing variety of subjects and themes, and her extraordinary talent enables her to mold the structure, language, and tone as a particular story demands. Nottage writes smart, incisive investigations into human nature, and her stories and the characters peopling them are richly specific. The plays are rooted in their place and time, suffused with authenticity and real human heartbeats. This specificity helps the work resonate broadly by showing us the human desires, failings, kindness, disappointment, and resilience that connect us all. "All my plays are about people who have been marginalized," Nottage has said.

In early 2022, Nottage had three New York productions running simultaneously: the Broadway musical MJ at the Neil Simon Theatre, which she co-created with director/choreographer Christopher Wheeldon; her new play Clyde's at Second Stage Theater; and an opera adaptation of her play Intimate Apparel, commissioned by The Met/LCT Opera/Musical Theater Commissioning Program and for which she wrote the libretto. In addition to her Obie Award-winning play Fabulation, Nottage's work includes Sweat, Ruined, Crumbs from the Table of Joy, Mlima's Tale, Las Meninas, and By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, as well as a musical adaptation of The Secret Life of Bees. A graduate of Brown University and the Yale School of Drama, she is an associate professor at Columbia University School of the Arts and a member of the Dramatists Guild.

Barrymore Award-winning director Amina Robinson will make her Lantern debut with Fabulation, or The Re-Education of Undine. Born and raised in Philadelphia, Robinson is a professional actor, director, and currently a professor of acting and musical theater at Temple University as well as artistic director of The Centre Theater in Norristown, PA. Robinson's directing credits include School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play and 74 Seconds... to Judgment at Arden Theatre Company, Sunset Baby at Azuka Theatre, Dauphin Island at Passage Theatre, Godspell and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee at Temple University, and The Color Purple at Theatre Horizon, for which she became the first Black woman to win a Barrymore Award for Outstanding Direction of a Musical.

Angela Bey makes their Lantern debut in the title role of Undine. The ensemble cast also includes Gregory Isaac as Addict/Ensemble (A Man for All Seasons; The Gospel According to Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens & Count Leo Tolstoy: Discord; The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui; Betrayal) and Ebony Pullum as Mother/Ensemble (Me and the Devil, Red Velvet, Romeo and Juliet). Making their Lantern debuts with Fabulation are Tanesha M. Ford as Grandma/Ensemble, Marchael Giles as Flow/Ensemble, Kash Goins as Father/Ensemble, Kishia Nixon as Stephie/Ensemble, and Zach Valdez as Hervé/Guy/Ensemble.

Director Amina Robinson has assembled a talented creative team that includes scenic designer Dirk Durossette (Measure for Measure, Mrs. Warren's Profession, QED), costume designer Tiffany Bacon (Lantern debut), lighting designer Matthew Miller (Lantern debut), sound designer Larry D. Fowler, Jr. (The Vertical Hour, Informed Consent, Photograph 51), and dialect coach Lynne Innerst (Uncle Vanya). Also making their Lantern debuts are Devon Sinclair as choreographer, Noelle Diane Johnson as intimacy consultant, and Reva Stover as associate director. Lantern 2021/22 Season Professional Apprentice Jennifer Spencer served as assistant director, alongside longtime Lantern Stage Manager Rebecca Smith.

About Lantern Theater Company

Founded in 1994 and concluding its 28th season with Fabulation, Lantern Theater Company's mission is to produce plays that investigate and illuminate what is essential in the human spirit and the spirit of the times. The Lantern serves the Greater Philadelphia region with artistic and educational programming, notably partnering with middle schools and high schools in the Philadelphia School District to provide in-classroom residencies in support of curricular learning. Throughout the Covid-19 health crisis, the Lantern continuously provided artistic programming on both a free and paid basis, including livestreamed readings of Shakespeare plays in spring 2020; professionally filmed and edited Plays from the Lantern Archives; and newly created and critically acclaimed digital productions of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, Molly Sweeney by Brian Friel, The Gospel According To... by Scott Carter, the American premiere of Neil Bartlett's The Plague from Albert Camus' La Peste, and the world premiere of Me and the Devil, co-written and directed by Steve H. Broadnax III.

The Lantern returned to live performances with its holiday production of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol in December 2021 and its Philadelphia premiere production of A Man for All Seasons by Robert Bolt in spring 2022. The Lantern's 2022/23 Mainstage Season will be announced in mid-June 2022, which will include the previously announced Tony Award-winning comic masterpiece Travesties by Tom Stoppard and three additional plays.

More information about the Lantern is available online at www.lanterntheater.org.

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