Undine’s Inspirations: CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY and Condoleezza Rice
Lynn Nottage’s factual and fictional inspirations for Undine and FABULATION
In Lynn Nottage’s Fabulation, or The Re-Education of Undine — onstage at Lantern Theater Company June 2 through 26, 2022 — high-powered Manhattan PR entrepreneur Undine Barnes Calles must get back in touch with the self she left behind: Sharona Watkins, from Brooklyn, with a loving and living family. She has spent most of her life making the alter ego “Undine” and 14 years fully living in the world and personality she created. There were two primary inspirations for this act of refashioning the self to get ahead: Nottage’s inspiration for the character and Undine’s inspiration for her new name.
Sharona Watkins chose her new name while in an American Literature class at Dartmouth: Undine, after Undine Spragg, the anti-heroine of Edith Wharton’s 1913 novel The Custom of the Country. Nottage’s Undine describes Wharton’s Undine as an intriguing figure who rises from humble beginnings to wealth and celebrity. While that is true, the novel’s main figure is not presented with admiration; her journey is more complicated than a simple rags-to-riches story.
The Spraggs are a newly wealthy family from the Midwest who arrive in New York City looking to get Undine, their beautiful and ambitious daughter, married to someone of high social status and significant wealth. Undine is drawn to extravagance and status, and at first is unable to find a match as the old-money society looks down on her perceived lack of taste. She eventually does marry the son of one such family — only to find that they no longer have much cash.
Over the course of several years, Undine pursues her desires for material gain and social status by divorcing her first husband for a lover, then seeking to marry a French count. When she discovers she needs an annulment to marry the count, she leverages a custody battle over her young son to force her ex-husband to agree. But her life as an aristocrat is also dissatisfying, as the strict behavioral expectations and insufficient cash flow frustrate her. She eventually ends up remarried to Elmer Moffat, the businessman from the Midwest she married and divorced before coming to New York in the first place, who has now become extremely wealthy. But as the novel closes, she still contemplates having more, even beyond the wealth she has finally achieved.
By naming herself after Undine Spragg, Fabulation’s Undine Barnes Calles chose a namesake who explicitly prioritizes wealth above all else. She is also a complicated mother figure — a parallel Undine is unintentionally forced to contend with in the play. And yet, Undine Spragg is a compelling character, one who the reader might find themselves rooting for despite her less-than-admirable qualities. How much did Undine Barnes recognize of herself in Undine Spragg when she chose that name? Did she think she was a charming iconoclast, or did she know she was doing something she might someday regret?
One of Nottage’s inspirations for the play is a much more current — and much more powerful — figure: Condoleezza Rice. In a 2004 New York Times article about the play, Nottage said: “I read this article about Condoleezza Rice [in the New Yorker], and I said: ‘This is exactly who I’m talking about. A person who has such a single-minded pursuit of success that they are willing to give up anything.’’’ Undine may go into PR, but her pursuit of success has much in common with those who go into the image-conscious world of politics.
Rice’s biography does not match Undine’s; she remained extremely close to her parents throughout their lives and is proud of her past in 1960s Birmingham as a member of an educated, middle-class Black family that largely stayed out of the Civil Rights movement. But she shares an essential quality with Undine: the determination to change herself as needed to reach her goals. Until her teens, Rice was intent on being a concert pianist, and worked tirelessly toward that goal. When it ended, she went into foreign policy, first as a Democrat and then as an increasingly staunch Republican. Her guiding principles on foreign policy shifted in line with what was becoming more popular in the powerful circles, until she was espousing beliefs that opposed the ones she fought for just a few years earlier.
An early line of the Nicholas Lemann profile of Rice that inspired Nottage is “Rice is a performer.” He is literally referencing her ease in front of an audience, but as the profile makes clear, she is also able to perform the version of “Condoleezza Rice” her particular audience most needs her to be. This type of refashioning can be seen in politicians up and down the ticket and behind the scenes: the ability to create and then perform the version of self that is most in-demand wins votes and power. Crafting a self, and building a perception of authenticity within it, is central to the version of Undine we meet at the beginning of the play.
While Undine Spragg and Condoleezza Rice share ambition and a shrewd ability to put on the precise show necessary in the moment to achieve their goals, Undine takes their lessons several steps further in creating a brand new persona to make the life she dreams of. But while the fictional Spragg and the real-life Rice achieved their goals, Undine’s success is shorter-lived. When her carefully crafted character falls apart, she must find a way to stop performing and start simply being.
More reading: Meet the Playwright, Part II: On Lynn Nottage — More about the celebrated writer behind FABULATION
Lantern Theater Company’s production of Fabulation, or The Re-Education of Undine is onstage June 2 through 26, 2022, at St. Stephen’s Theater. Visit our website for tickets and information.
