←Recommendations of Fable

Doug DeVita is one of my favorite playwrights, and “Fable” reinforces the many reasons why I love his writing. This full-length play is multilayered, highly theatrical, funny, and heartrending. It really is meant to be seen and experienced, but it also makes for a fascinating read. One of the most perfectly crafted plays you will ever encounter. Bravo!

A dark love letter to old Broadway, this play serves as a model for the theatrical biography. Showing June at various stages of her life with a dreamlike quality, we're shown a complete character on stage, and yet it flies by, never once lagging. Her contentious relationships with her mother, her sister, and those she works with gives her a human quality we can relate with, and yet provides the conflict to keep our interest. The supporting characters are similarly admirable and flawed. This is a grand theatrical experience.

What Gypsy Rose Lee's sister, June, thought about how she's portrayed in the famous musical about her sister is something I never thought about before, but Doug DeVita clearly has - and this play is about so much more than that. It explores the vast gray area between truth and fiction, and who gets to decide what will be settled on as truth. Should you fight to be remembered truthfully, or should you just be glad that you're being remembered at all? What an engaging, theatrical play!

For fans of the musical Gypsy, Fable can read as an irresistibly dishy behind-the-scenes making-of piece, as two legendary sisters battle over whose version of the truth will be remembered. But that reading would only scratch the surface of the highly theatrical and deeply personal exploration of memory, ambition, fact, and fiction Doug DeVita has given us here. The stagecraft imaginatively and expertly underlines the artifice, authenticity, and relentless effort that go into defining one’s life and legacy. “We’re all liars”, their mother tells them, and boy, does that ring true.

Fable is so gorgeously theatrical; I love the framing of the piece which mirrors the content so well. It's a story of someone who is barely a footnote in theatre history, and that is a damn shame. It's at turns hilarious and heartbreaking; the closing moments resonate deeply. This play features excellent roles for women over forty and presents exciting design opportunities.

FABLE is a delicious tale of sisterly acrimony and unquenchable longing. Doug DeVita deploys masterly theatricality in conjuring a version of GYPSY's genesis. Through the frail yet still unstoppable June Havoc, he gives voice to all those who feel they’re secondary, underwritten characters in other people’s histories. His FABLE sings and dances, bites and brays as it spotlights the tenacity, myth-making, and desperate fear of being forgotten that undergirds a seminal work of American musical theater. Featuring smart, economical doubling that expertly expands the play’s themes, irresistible comedy, and poignance.

I don't have the history with GYPSY that many audiences will presumably have. Really a passing knowledge, more than anything. But DeVita excels here, as he does with his PHILLIE series, at playing with the boundaries of time, memory, fiction, truth and family, painting emotionally layered and deeply complicated relationships that resound no matter one's connection with the source material. Laced with the showbiz setting, natch, to make it utterly irrestistible.
This is a story of sisters and daughters, bound to one another through the truth, lies and swift kicks in the pants from beyond the grave ...

How do you want to be remembered? The way you really were or how you’re portrayed in a Broadway musical about your more-famous-sister’s life?

You’d think it’d be a great problem to have!

June Havoc, respected character actress and sister to Gypsy Rose Lee, would disagree.

DeVita brilliantly frames her story like a dance marathon. Rousingly theatrical, the storybook atmosphere makes the details sting with truth... whether they’re true or not. FABLE is a fable about a fable about two very real lives. The dialogue sizzles, the drama soars, and these sisters brand your heart.

They say history is written by the winners. Which makes this "fabled" look at the rivalry between two show-biz sisters fascinating in that it tells the story of the creation of the show Gypsy from another point of view. June Havoc may have been less famous than her sister, but her story is in many ways more compelling. Petty jealousies, tantrums and catty dialogue are in great supply here, but all of it comes across as real and justified. The use of multiple actresses to play June at different stages lends this play (and June) tremendous depth.

Unlike many of those who have recommended this piece, I am not familiar with the musical "Gypsy." However, I feel like I am now. The theme of 'who has the right to tell your story' has always spun around and around in my head. I think it's fascinating and DeVita proves that it is. This quick and witty piece makes you fall in love with June and each scene leads you directly into the next. Very well done!