When you find yourself inside a Lynn Nottage play you go on an intimate ride with her characters. In Fabulation, we journey with a Black woman, Undine, who gets sent down a rabbit hole back to a place she’s avoided for fourteen years; Home. As the company and I ventured through the rehearsal process, we truly fell in love with the wild mash up of characters Undine meets and rediscovers back home. Through Undine’s lens, we see the flaws in an American system that her “new money” won’t hide. Of all of her losses, abandoning her history and her people costs the most. Nottage has this truthful, brave way of presenting a kaleidoscope of characters in Fabulation that everyone witnessing can relate to their humanity and audacity. The boldness that I’ve witnessed onstage by way of our stellar company of actors has beaconed deep vulnerability, recognition, and empathy in the ways that only a satirical comedy can do. Their work affirms that the greatest satirical comedies warm our bellies and send us thinking. The vibrancy and authenticity in the design has been a celebration of the fabric of America; Black and Brown people hold the pulse and looking good doing so. I’ve meditated a lot about the heart of New York- the people who keep the city and furthermore, America alive.In a 2004 interview in The Brooklyn Rail about Fabulation, Lynn Nottage says "It’s about everyone who has drifted away from who they are. One of the things I wanted to examine is how difficult it is to be poor in America right now.You can have all the intelligence in the world and think that you’re savvy, but the system is still incredibly difficult to negotiate, and you literally can become trapped in there. And that’s what I wanted to show, that this woman who has achieved a certain level of success can go back into the system and realize, ‘Oh, I can get stuck.’ There is something fundamentally wrong with the system, not with the people who are trapped within it." Most of us, like Undine, sat with a dream and effort to build a life that would usher it into reality. My wish for all of us is that as we orchestrate a life for ourselves, we fortify the soil we are born into along with the gardens of chosen family and communities we create.