Undine On Top

Undine has everything she wants from life, and then in a flash it's all gone. Her glamorous husband runs off with her money and her sense of self-worth — he at least left her pregnant — and she's forced to move back across the bridge to Brooklyn and her family. No longer does she plan celebrity parties and provide a point of access into the upper crust of society for her fellow African Americans in Manhattan. Her life is now watching her parents go to work and buy scratcher tickets, listening to her brother talk about the rap epic he's going to write someday and scoring drugs for Grandma. It's that last hobby that puts her in court-ordered rehab and back on the path to being something more like a fulfilled human being than the empty symbol of the petty bourgeoisie she had become. Lynn Nottage's Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine is presented by the Washington University Performing Arts Department at 8 p.m. Thursday and Friday, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday (March 25 through 28) at the A.E. Hotchner Studio Theatre (6445 Forsyth Boulevard; 314-935-6543). Tickets are $10 to $15.

March 25-28, 2010