'By the Way, Meet Vera Stark' (Signature Theatre Company)

It’s been a while since I’ve seen two productions of the same play—a contemporary one, I mean, of course, not a classic—particularly since I started posting reports on Rick On Theater.  That is, until I caught the revival of Lynn Nottage’s By the Way, Meet Vera Stark at the Signature Theatre Company at 8 p.m. on Friday, 23 February 2019.  I had seen the Second Stage première on 19 May 2011 (see my report, posted on 27 May 2011).  I’m pleased to report that my opinion of the play did not change; in that 2011 play report, I wrote: “If I taught playwriting . . . Vera Stark would be one of the models I’d promote in class.  It’s a perfect example of top-flight dramaturgy . . . .”  I still feel that way.

By the Way, Meet Vera Stark premièred at the Second Stage Theatre in the Theatre District on 9 May 2011 (after previews starting on 6 April) and closed on 12 June.  The production was directed by Jo Bonney   with Sanaa Lathan, who won the 2012 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Lead Actress for her performance in the title role.  (The production also won the Lortel for Outstanding Costume Design for ESosa, the professional name of designer Emilio Sosa.)  The production was also nominated for Drama Desk and AUDELCO Awards.  The play ran at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles on 18 September-28 October 2012, again with Bonney at the helm and Lathan on stage, and then at the Goodman Theatre, Chicago, Illinois, from 27 April to 2 June 2013, staged by Chuck Smith with Tamberla Perry as Vera.

The Signature revival, the first mounting in New York City since the première, directed by Kamilah Forbes, Executive Producer of the Apollo Theater, began previews on 29 January 2019 on the Irene Diamond Stage of the Pershing Square Signature Center and opened on 19 February; the production is scheduled to close on 10 March (extended from 3 March).  Forbes’s revival for STC runs two hours and 25 minutes with one intermission.

For a more detailed synopsis of Vera Stark’s plot, I refer ROTters to my 2011 report (https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2011/05/by-way-meet-vera-stark.html), which also includes a biographical and dramaturgical profile  of the author, but broadly, Nottage is writing about the Hollywood of the 1930s and the treatment—or maltreatment—of African-American actresses of the era, inspired by Nottage’s admiration of black performers such as Butterfly McQueen (1911-95), Stepin Fetchit (1902-85), Hattie McDaniel (1893-1952), Bill “Bojangles” Robinson (1877-1949), Louise Beavers (1902-62), and Eddie “Rochester” Anderson (1905-77) who suffered indignities and worse just to play maids, hookers, shoe-shine boys, and Pullman porters.  (Nottage’s title character is based loosely on real-life actress Theresa Harris, 1906-85, who made a career from the ’30s through the ’50s playing maids to some of Hollywood’s biggest female stars.)  The playwright also lets us see the repercussions of this history in a 2003 academic conference on Vera Stark’s career and a glimpse of her video appearance, by way of a live reenactment, on a 1973 daytime talk show (think The Ellen DeGeneres Show or the old Merv Griffin Show—but cheesy.)

When word spreads that one studio is about to shoot a Civil War epic à la Gone with the Wind or Raintree County, the refrain among Vera and her friends is that that means “slaves with lines.”  The African-American actors are ready to play slaves—as long as it means actually being able to speak on camera.  As one of Nottage’s black characters says, “[W]hy we still playing slaves?  Shucks, it was hard enough getting free the first time.”  The response?  “It’s steady work—and it beats picking cotton.”

The original staging of Vera Stark came years before the prominence of #MeToo and #TimesUp and the movement to obtain equal pay and treatment of female actors in the movie business (exemplified when Mark Wahlberg donated the pay he received in 2018 for reshoots of a movie when he learned that co-star Michelle Williams was paid substantially less for her work on the same job).  It also predated the #OscarSoWhite movement that came to the nation’s attention in 2015 to draw awareness to the lack of diversity in the recognition of film excellence.  Nottage and Forbes didn’t make any changes in the script or the interpretation of the play to capitalize on these industry upheavals, but they informed those of us who are seeing the play now in contrast—or perhaps I should call it “enhancement”—to seeing it eight years ago.  This, of course, isn’t a directorial choice; it’s just history moving on. 

I was delighted to see, also, that the two productions didn’t vary in quality, either.  I was sort of waiting to see if my enjoyment of the Second Stage première was due to the great production at the Tony Kiser Theater, but I liked the STC production just as much as I had the earlier one—and I was strongly reminded of what it was that I liked so much: the way Nottage let her story unfold and how she brought it to life.  I was also impressed again with the way the playwright used humor—even broad humor—to make very serious points without ever sacrificing either the funniness or the import of what she was showing us.  (Thus what I labeled “top-flight dramaturgy.”)  I’m not a playwright and one of the reasons I’m not is that I can’t do that.  I can, however, recognize the ability in others and appreciate it for the talent it represents.

The performances at Signature are all excellent.  I said of the cast of the Second Stage première, “I don’t remember seeing a play in quite some time in which the entire ensemble was all working on the same level as consistently as this one” and concluded that “all the actors who played two roles not only differentiated between them, . . . but created two perfectly apt and well-defined characters.”  I had the same impression from Forbes’s cast.  Sure there are significant differences between Lathan’s Vera and Jessica Frances Dukes’s, and Stephanie J. Block’s 2011 rendition of Gloria, the white starlet for whom Vera works as a maid, and Jenni Barber’s at STC, but both are honest—within the farcical outlines into which Nottage has fitted them—and complete portrayals. 

The same is true of the rest of the cast as well.  Standouts, in addition to Barber and Dukes, include Warner Miller as Leroy Barksdale, the film director’s chauffeur who makes a play for Vera, and Carra Patterson’s Anna Mae Simpkins, one of Vera’s two actress-roommates who’s passing as a Brazilian ex-pat.  (I can attest to the fact that when Patterson returns in act two as Afua Assata Ejobo, a lesbian poet, in the conference scenes, and Miller appears as the self-important academic conference host, Herb Forrester, I could barely remember their earlier personations, so thoroughly did they and the other actors morph into their new roles.  ROTters may recall that I made a similar observation about the cast of Lileana Blain-Cruz’s revival of Lynn Nottage’s Fabulation at STC last December; see my report posted on 10 January 2019.)  Singling out a few actors, however, isn’t really fair because the entire ensemble is top notch, and they play off one another superbly.

The staging was also of the same high quality here as it was at Second Stage.  In fact, Clint Ramos’s opening set, the Hollywood apartment of Gloria Mitchell, the white starlet known as “America’s Little Sweetie Pie,” was, like Neil Patel’s in 2011, an evocation of one of those impossibly lavish Art Deco flats we’ve seen in the movies of that era, all white and chrome with up-center French doors through which actresses like Loretta Young liked to make dramatic entrances—which Forbes has Barber’s Gloria do a couple of times. 

Ramos does equally well with the contrasting first-act set for Vera’s neat-but-cramped apartment, which she shares with Lottie McBride (Heather Alicia Simms) and Anna Mae, two other aspiring African-American actresses.  (McBride and Dukes still nail that wonderful scene during a party at Gloria’s—where they’re working as waitresses—when they try to impress the Russian émigré director, Manoel Felciano’s Maximilian Von Oster, of the Southern epic, The Belle of New Orleans.  (Van Oster, by the way, arrives with Anna Mae on his arm, his Latin bombshell of a date.)  They perform a couple of hilarious bits as “Negroes of the earth” to “audition” for slave roles in his film.  The 180-degree transformation, as if on cue, is simultaneously hilarious and devastating.)

Ramos’s sets are perfectly complimented by Dede M. Ayite’s costumes which evoke both the three periods Vera Stark  spans (1933, 1973, and 2003) and the various characters the actors inhabit. (Just as in 2011, you must get a load of Vera’s 1973 flowing, multi-colored get-up in the TV show.  The panelists at the academic conference, Rediscovering Vera Stark, wore a collection of character-defining ensembles that were at once outrageous and right-on.) 

And while we’re on the subject of the production side of the revival, I must compliment Katherine Freer for the slides that helped establish the atmosphere for all the periods and locales, and producer Caroline Onikute, cinematographer Shawn Peters, editor Keith Davis, and their team for the wonderful clip of The Belle of New Orleans (scored convincingly by Daniel Kluger) screened in the last scene, showing the final cut of footage we saw Gloria rehearsing with Vera when the starlet is preparing for her screen test.  We can see that between the two of them, they turn the melodramatic, clichéd, and racist scene into a heart-rending performance—and from what has gone on before, we know it has been Vera’s coaching that made it so.

The press coverage for the Signature Theatre Company’s By the Way, Meet Vera Stark was relatively meagre, especially for a double Pulitzer-winner.  Show-Score counted only 25 “Critics’ Reviews” (as of 5 March) and, not counting a few duplications (where a writer’s review appeared on more than one platform), I found a couple of more.  Based on the 25, Show-Score gave Vera Stark an average rating of 74, which isn’t very high—particularly when you consider how good I thought the show was.  Of all the notices tallied by the site, 76% were positive, 20% were mixed, and 4% were negative.  Show-Score’s highest-scoring reviews were seven 85’s (including Broadway World, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal), with five 80’s coming up next (CurtainUp and Talkin’ Broadway, among others); the lowest score was a 45 (Broadway & Me), preceded by two 55’s (including Theatre’s Leiter Side).  My survey will comprise 16 reviews.

In the Wall Street Journal, Terry Teachout declared Vera Stark “one of the smartest plays, by Ms. Nottage or anyone else, to open in New York in recent years.”  The WSJ reviewer explained:

If you know Lynn Nottage from “Intimate Apparel” and “Sweat,” her most frequently produced plays, you might well make the mistake of supposing that she’s a dead-serious kitchen-sink realistic playwright.  That’s part of why her Signature Theatre “residency,” in the course of which the deservedly admired off-Broadway company will revive two of Ms. Nottage’s earlier plays and give the premiere of a new one later this season, is so important an event: The plays that she has picked for production are nothing like the ones for which she is now best known.  First came “Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine,” her 2004 satire about the black bourgeoisie, which Signature staged in December to riotous effect.  Now the company is mounting “By the Way, Meet Vera Stark,” an even more original play that was first produced eight years ago by Second Stage Theatre.  It is, like “Fabulation,” a comedy with a sharp satirical kick, but one that is at bottom commandingly serious.

(I quote this passage at length because it not only makes an important point about Nottage and Signature relating to this production, but it echoes what I’ve been saying about the playwright’s work in my reports on Fabulation and now, Vera Stark.) 

Teachout was loath to reveal too much detail, touting Nottage’s surprises, but he added that “Ms. Nottage keeps you guessing all the way to the final curtain.”  The Journalist did complain that “‘By the Way, Meet Vera Stark’ would profit from a slightly less frenetic production,” despite the playwright’s instruction in the script, “one that allowed the play’s comic punches to land on their own instead of being telegraphed to the viewer.”  On the other hand, Teachout proclaimed, “The cast, however, is splendid—Ms. Dukes is a find—and Clint Ramos’s set is downright lavish.”  He gave “special credit” to Katherine Freer, responsible for The Belle of New Orleans “clip,” and Daniel Kluger, “who scored it so convincingly that you'll swear it came out of a Hollywood vault.”  In the end, Teachout summed up that Vera Stark is “witty and thoughtful in equal measure, and much of it—most of it, in fact—is also chokingly funny.”  He recommended his readers see the productions, adding, “All of [Nottage’s] plays are this good, and all of them are completely different.”

Barbara Schuler of Long Island’s Newsday’s Bottom Line for Vera Stark was: “Humorous, thought-provoking play explores  racism in Hollywood.”  She dubbed the play “humorous, thought-provoking” and “yet another example of the meticulous research Nottage is known for.”  Schuler, however, asserted that Vera Stark really “should be considered two plays”: a “pure screwball comedy” in act one and a second act which “has a harder edge.”  The playwright, the Newsday reviewer pointed out, “gets in . . . social criticism, while not letting up on her key premise—the lack of meaningful roles for women of color in Hollywood, clearly a precursor to the #OscarsSoWhite movement. . . .  Think of it as the kind of theater where no one is safe.” 

Alexis Soloski called the play a “barbed and booby-trapped comedy” in the New York Times, “a play, often a very funny one, about representation and erasure.”  Of the screwball first act, Soloski observed that Forbes “doesn’t always nail the fouetté-on-a-dime rhythms and not all of the actors are on the same page (figuratively, mostly) it’s still a delight.”  She described act two as “more like a screwball tragedy.”  “The play is fizzy and then it isn’t,” Soloski asserted, “because fizz goes flat when you really consider the careers that could have been and the blinkered ones that were.”  Vera Stark “is not especially orderly,” said the Times reviewer.  “But it is such a good show—so clever, so playful, so keen to shapeshift and timeslip and whiz through half a dozen separate genres . . . — that I spent the next several days trying to figure out why it isn’t an absolutely great one.”  Soloski explained:

Maybe that’s because “Vera Stark” depends on a kind of absence.  We see Vera in various contexts—as servant, as friend, as aspiring actress and bantering back lot doll. In these scenes she mostly plays herself, except when she’s trying to charm a director who doesn’t want to hire a black woman unless he can see “100 years of oppression in the hunch of her shoulders.”  But that self is fluid, mutable.

Vera “keeps shifting out of focus,” Soloski found, but not because “the performances aren’t vivid.”  The review-writer concluded:

The production tries to counter this.  There are a few attempts to pinion Vera, but something in the character keeps sliding out and away.  She’s too slippery for real tragedy, too evasive for farce.  She’s the screen before the projector warms up, ready to show us whatever woman our imperfect hearts can dream.

In New York magazine, Sara Holdren labeled the play “a satire, a eulogy, and, in some ways, an homage.”  It’s “directed with zingy energy” but “can at times feel like a revue by an aging vaudeville star—a bit broad, a bit padded.”  Nonetheless, “it’s anchored by a crackling central performance by Jessica Frances Dukes.”  Furthermore, felt Holdren, “it’s a compelling reminder of Nottage’s playful inventiveness.”  But the reviewer from New York had a caveat:

Nottage is throwing a dart at a very fine point—the bull’s eye of really good satire, something that feels sharp and true enough that it absorbs and transcends caricature.  It’s a hard shot to make, and both as a play and in this production, Vera Stark doesn’t always succeed at avoiding parodic broadness.

The problem, said Holdren, is that “the break” between the Hollywood fantasy and the real-world reality “lacks definition.”  (“There’s a kind of logic at work here,” observed the New York reviewer: “The only scenes that calm down a bit . . . are the scenes without any white folks.”)  In the end, Holdren felt that “if Vera Stark sometimes shoots wide of the mark, it’s still taking aim at something profound—and, like Vera herself, it’s part of an audacious ongoing dramatic legacy.”

Sarah Larson of the New Yorker dubbed the STC production “a vibrant revival of Lynn Nottage’s satirical 2011 play.”  The review-writer found that “it’s contemplative and structurally bold” and “conveys no wistfulness for the way it was.”  “Not everything in ‘Vera Stark’ works,” reported Larson, “—the performances are often heightened in a way that hurts the play more than helps it—but its ending which . . . shows us why Vera’s performance was so striking, is revelatory.”  Larson concluded: “Dukes brings a subtle power to the scene; Nottage’s words deliver an emotional wallop.  The results are utterly transporting—exactly what we go to the theatre for.”

By the Way, Meet Vera Stark “walks and talks like a screwball comedy, it has a real brain in its head,” declared Marilyn Stasio in Variety.  Vera’s roommate, Lottie, for instance,

speaks from a lifetime of anger and hurt, detailing the realities that thinking people think they already know; but hearing them through Nottage’s strong dialogue and in Simms’s powerful voice is a real punch in the gut.

Stasio reported that the first act ends in “high comedy” (the impromptu audition of Lottie and Vera), but act two is “a downer” due to “its jarring shift in style.”

Helen Shaw of Time Out New York asserted of Vera Stark: “Although the Signature production often misses its step, it’s a welcome reminder that Nottage has a tricky pinball brain, capable of whanging through the decades and lighting us up with humor and rage.”  Calling the play “a postmodern comedy,” Shaw felt that the playwright “loses the laser focus of her satirical attack” in the second act “partly because she whirls from target to target” and Forbes’s “staging slow[s] things down” as well.  Cautioning that comedy needs special handling, the reviewer from TONY added that the director’s “experience is mainly in dramas, and so the tonal balance is wonky here.”  The staging, Shaw found, “elicits exaggerated performances; it often seems like the actors are playing to a nonexistent balcony.” 

In the cyber press, Tulis McCall (who also posts on Stage Buddy) called Nottage “a brave writer” on Front Row Center.  “She sees an idea that needs examining and she goes in with everything from a pick axe to a laser.”  McCall found that act one “is fast and often slick, with most of the characters being caricatures.”  The FRC reviewer, though, deemed “[t]he breath of freshness” here to be Gloria, the white star, rather than the black characters, including Vera, to whose story the play is devoted.  In act two, according to McCall, the focus shifts to Vera—until the end of the TV talk show when Gloria returns to the stage and the two actresses “battle for the spotlight like two old soldiers.”  McCall asserted, “This is a well intentioned play that never lands in one spot.  We hear about Vera’s struggles in a way that is more a litany than a gut punch.”  The review-writer contended that “we never get into the heart of this woman. . . . We see it but we don’t feel it.   Everyone is a caricature and the beating hearts that keep them alive never surface.”

On Broadway World, Michael Dale declared the STC revival of Vera Stark a “crackling good new mounting.”  Elyse Sommer of CurtainUp labeled the play “a fiendishly clever satire” that “starts out as screwball comedy” and then “turns meta-theatrical.”  Sommer found that “the second act still has some problems,” but “Director Forbes has done her utmost to help her actors make the most of the play's many hilarious acting opportunities.”  The CU reviewer found, “The second act's structural shift is fun and ingeniously merges the three” periods of the play, but Vera’s “story loses some of its vitality when she's talked about rather than acting out her own story.”  Despite this, Sommer concluded, “I was happy to meet this Vera Stark—as I think you too will be.”

James Wilson of Talkin’ Broadway characterized the STC production of Vera Stark “a visually stunning revival” of a play that “does not stint on great ideas and tackles pressing social issues.”  Wilson, however. admonished his readers, “The play is a satire, though, and the heady, intellectual queries drift breezily above the comic hijinks.”  He added, however, that “there are a lot of laughs, but sometimes at the expense of rich character development.”  “Still,” the TB reviewer reported, “as directed by Kamilah Forbes, this is a topnotch production.”  Wilson concluded, “The play does not try to conceal the underlying dark truths, but they are made palatable (and immensely entertaining) as if projected with the gloss and panache of a 1930s film epic.”

Jesse Oxfeld, in the first of two reviews on New York Stage Review, warned, “Vera Stark attempts many things at once.” 

It is a satire of Golden Age Hollywood that tries to play, in its first act, as its own screwball comedy.  It is an acknowledgement of the limitations people of color found—still find—even when they achieve popular success.  It is a look at how the celebrity culture chews up and spits out people as they age.  It is a mirror accentuating the degree to which everything in entertainment is an image, a lie. It is a spoof, in its second act, of modern, identity-based academic culture.  And it is also a sympathetic take on what women like Vera, and Hattie, went through.

Oxfeld characterized the production as “elegant” and the play as “funny, smart, frequently clever, and ultimately successful in achieving only some of its goals.”  Like Fabulation, Oxfeld noted, Vera Stark is “a whipsawed mix of realism and absurdity.  And here it doesn’t always work.”  Carving out exceptions for the final scene of act one, the end of Gloria’s cocktail party, and Vera’s diva turn on the 1973 talk show, the reviewer caviled that “the early scenes lag, and the academic spoof in the second act is obvious and unnecessary.  And the hinted-at deep secret—that Vera and Gloria were related, that what we think of as black-and-white is never really thus—is left unexplored.”  His final remark was: “The point is that everything is artifice, everyone has a shtick, at least in Hollywood, and that eventually everyone gets stuck in that rut.  Especially Vera Stark, who had the least choice about it.”

In the second NYSR review, Melissa Rose Bernardo proclaimed that Vera “is one of the juiciest characters Lynn Nottage has ever written,” but that her play “is one of Nottage’s least cohesive—enjoyable and zany, but uncharacteristically uneven.”  Act one “has a screwball-comedy feel” but act two “is like an entirely different play.” 

On Theatre’s Leiter Side, Samuel L. Leiter, calling Vera Stark “a satirically serious look at Hollywood’s treatment of black actresses,” lamented that it succeeded for him “only half way.”  One reason, apparently, is that “Act Two . . . shifts gears grindingly” and another may be that, though she “redeems herself brilliantly” in act two, Dukes is “required to overact in Act One.”  Leiter expressed other quibbles as well.  The blogger’s principal complaint seems to have been, “Nottage’s intelligence, wit, and craftsmanship are writ large throughout the play, but its stylistic leaps along the spectrum from farce to realism do little to draw one into its world and lots to keep one at a distance.”  This is furthered by the failure of Forbes’s directing of the “barely nuanced production . . . to find a tone that consistently ties its disparate scenes together.”  Leiter summed up: “With a few exceptions, the approach is forced farce, seeking laughs by egregiously overstated comic acting, and excessive shouting, which pulls focus from Nottage’s ideas.” 

On Broadway & Me, the website with Show-Score’s lowest rating (45) for Vera Stark, in a notice Show-Score says is by Janice C. Simpson (there’s no byline on the page), the reviewer characterized Nottage’s play as “simultaneously a comedy, a tragedy, a call to arms and, especially in its second act, structurally adventurous.”  Simpson found that “Kamilah Forbes . . . has a tougher time [than Jo Bonney, who directed the 2011 production] finding the right rhythm.”    The B&M blogger felt, “At times the pacing is too fast and jokes fly by before they can register.  Other moments drag on, particularly a few of the segments that use video.”  Accompanied by her sister, who fell asleep before the end of the play, Simpson tried to recap what happened, but “realized I’d already forgotten.  Which kind of breaks my heart since remembering Vera is the whole point of the piece.”

“You may be tempted to bail after the sluggish first act of Lynn Nottage’s By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, now receiving an adequate revival at Signature Theatre—but you shouldn’t,” cautioned Zachary Stewart on TheaterMania.  In a reversal of most (I daresay all) other reviewers, Stewart continued: “The second act is the best part.  It’s where we truly meet the actor Vera Stark.”  (“Simms and Patterson’s [second-act] dueling side-eye is the most thrilling stage combat currently in New York,” proclaimed Stewart.  Dukes’s turn in the TV talk show has her “enacting one of the most striking character transformations I’ve ever witnessed.”)  The TM reviewer observed, “The Hollywood machine that feeds on black actors is an uncommon subject for comedy, but Nottage is an uncommon writer.”  The play “is at its best when . . . subtly honest humor bubbles to the surface,” asserted Stewart, “but the comedy is usually more ponderous,” though the review-writer blamed this more on the “material” than Forbes’s “competent directing.”  In Stewart’s final estimation, “The result is a thoughtful tribute to the black actresses of a bygone era” and Vera Stark  “makes the case that they deserve more than just a passing introduction.”

[I probably shouldn’t do this, but the repeated remarks among the critiques of the 2019 revival of By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, which are much the same as some that appeared in 2011, that there’s a conflict in style between act one and act two of the play and production, makes me feel I have to repeat my response of eight years ago to this perception.  Here’s what I said then:

The apparent disconnect, as Michael Feingold has it in The Village Voice, between act one and act two, when the style changes some, didn’t pull me up—all three scenes (the 1933 Hollywood, the 1973 talk show, the 2003 academic conference) were all satires, filtered through the sensibility of each era.  What reviewers like [David] Rooney [of The Hollywood Reporter] seem to have missed is that Nottage isn’t just sending up the Hollywood of the ’30s or examining the lives on the African-American actors trying to navigate the gated world.  In the second part of the play, she’s looking critically at the way we turn flawed people into legends and use them as vessels for our own aspirations and agendas.  That’s what Brad Donovan [the TV talk-show host] and Peter Rhys-Davies [a British rocker guest] do in 1973 and the three conference panelists do in 2003—and Nottage is showing us how we all do it. Vera may be little more than a washed up drunk pretending she’s still 25, but we project onto her a whole wealth of fun-house nostalgia because we need her to have been a hero so we can stand on her shoulders.  The first act of Vera Stark isn’t just a funny send-up of screwball depression Hollywood.  It’s the material on which act two comments, like the commentary in the Talmud or the critical analysis that follows and draws on a piece of literature.  The two parts of Vera Stark aren’t discontinuous; they fit together like two halves of a torn photograph.  Besides, what saved even the frisson of discontinuity from splitting the play, is the way Nottage got her critical intent across by means of the jokes and parody not around or in spite of them.]  

'By The Way, Meet Vera Stark'

Last Thursday, 19 May, my theater companion, Diana, and I went uptown to the Second Stage Theatre’s home on West 43rd Street to see the highly-praised production of Lynn Nottage’s comedy-drama By The Way, Meet Vera Stark, a world première (Nottage’s last New York production, and her last play, was Ruined, the Pulitzer Prize winner for 2009, at the Manhattan Theatre Club.) For the first time in a long time, I can’t argue with the acclaim the play and the production have garnered in the press. (And, for the first time in a long time, Diana and I agreed!) If I taught playwriting—for which I have no qualifications, so it’s unlikely—Vera Stark would be one of the models I’d promote in class. It’s a perfect example of top-flight dramaturgy (helped immensely by an all-around excellent production, which I’ll get to shortly). Here’s what I mean:

As readers of ROT will know by now, I have a short set of criteria for what I consider good theater. A good play has to do something more than just tell a story and it must do it theatrically. The first part’s probably self-explanatory, but all I mean there is that the play has to have a point of some kind, say something, profound or trivial. Storytelling’s a noble art of its own, but in itself, it’s not theater. As for theatricality, what I mean is the play must use the attributes of the live stage to accomplish its task. I don’t want a play to try to replicate a movie, a TV show, or a concert, though it can use the techniques of those arts; I want a play to be a play, live and, when necessary, overcoming that limitation by imaginative means. Nottage’s play and Jo Bonney’s staging do both of those things in spades.

In the first instance, Nottage, a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship (the “genius” grant), is showing us the Hollywood of the 1930s, especially the place of black actors in that world. (A subtitle for this report might be “Slaves With Lines”; that’s the exclamation the would-be African-American actors at the center of Vera Stark utter when they learn that a Southern epic, The Belle of New Orleans, is being cast.) We may know about the tribulations of now-famous actors like Butterfly McQueen, Stepin Fetchit, Hattie McDaniel, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Louise Beavers, and Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, who, like the black characters in Vera Stark, have, and often demonstrate, more dignity and depth than the roles to which they were assigned (on screen, but also in life) allowed them to reveal. But Nottage also shows us what it was like off the sound stages. Later, we see the playwright’s take on how we mythologize those groundbreakers after they’ve become icons. Nottage says that, fascinated with old Hollywood, she wanted to look at where she thought the movie business was heading in terms of race relations before the Hays Code was enforced in 1934, the year after the fictional Belle of New Orleans was made. The Motion Picture Production Code, as it was officially known, changed the way African Americans were (permitted to be) portrayed on screen, condemning black actors to careers as “enthusiastic and obsequious servants.” The playwright said that her intent was “to use the fast-paced humor of the period to irreverently explore the legacy of racism in Hollywood”—and, by extension I’d say, the rest of our society (especially the non-Jim Crow North with its less-blatant discrimination). By displaying the past, Nottage hopes that we’ll examine our present in comparison. She doesn’t think all that much has changed, for all the successful black filmmakers like Spike Jones and Tyler Perry, especially in the way African-American women are portrayed on film and TV.

But what makes this treatment of our history (and the subsequent rose-colored nostalgia) stageworthy is that Nottage doesn’t just tell us or even simply illustrate her ideas, she demonstrates them for us, and she does it with great (and I do mean great) humor. The first act, set in 1933, is a true laugh-riot—chockablock with jokes, gags, and comic turns, often in the low-comedy mold, but all for a serious and honest point, which Nottage never lets get away or treats trivially even as the audience howls with glee. (A couple of women behind Diana and me seemed even to anticipate the jokes before they arrived, almost as if they’d seen the play before and knew what was coming. Their joy was contagious, but it made it hard for me to catch some of the funny lines because the women were already laughing loudly. That’s the breaks, though.) Nottage said that she wanted to “pay homage to the screwball comedies of the 30’s” which she “adored.” Vera Stark’s second act moves up to 2003 as we attend “Rediscovering Vera Stark,” a conference on the actress and the movie that made her famous and beloved. We also visit, via live reenactment, 1973, when Vera made an appearance on The Brad Donovan Show, a kind of Mike Douglas or Merv Griffin celebrity talk show. The self-important panelists at the conference—a lesbian slam poet in combat boots and camouflage field jacket; a somewhat pedantic academic; and the host, a fey, prissy film geek—parse Vera’s every comment and gesture, each to support her or his private theories. For two simultaneous scenes in which the characters are all mostly sitting around and talking, it was remarkably dynamic and engaging.

That last attribute was, of course, in large part thanks to the acting and directing. Let me get to that. First, the production couldn’t have been cast better. No one hit a single false note or faltered—and most of the actors played two roles (except the two playing Vera and Gloria Mitchell, the Hollywood star who had the title role in The Belle of New Orleans and employed Vera as her real-life maid—who served as Gloria’s best friend and confidante), and each of them created two delightful figures, portraits of recognizable types who nevertheless never descended into stereotypes or clichés. (They were, however, caricatures, but the good kind—the kind that makes you recognize people and laugh at them.) I’ll get back to the acting shortly, but let me cover some of the other aspects of the production that helped raise it above the norm, despite the opportunity to turn it all into a travesty of one of those “where are they now?” or “whatever happened to . . .?” TV bios that cram the cable dial. (When Gloria shows up at the Brad Donovan interview, it was reminiscent of that oldie, This Is Your Life.)

Before I return to the acting, I have to cover the physical production (which is actually quite complex technically). Neil Patel, one of our most accomplished stage designers, especially for realistic or semi-realistic sets, realized a wonderfully evocative fantasy-‘30s environment for act one. To start the performance off on the right note and prepare the audience for the world we’d be entering, Patel designed a false proscenium arch for the stage, embellishing the frame with an art deco border and installing a purple velvet drape that rose in scalloped swooshes when the play opened. For the moment, the normally high-tech, metal-clad Second Stage theater became a depression-era playhouse. The centerpiece—of the whole play, really, but especially of the first act—was the salon/sitting room of the Hollywood home of Gloria Mitchell, “America’s Little Sweetie Pie.” (The Shirley Temple allusion is almost certainly intentional, considering the little moppet’s screen relationship with Bill Robinson.) It was all cream and white, with a plushly upholstered chaise in the center—not a real living space, but one that might have appeared in one of the movies of the era, like The Thin Man or My Man Godfrey. The contrast this set up from the first scene in the salon to the second in the shabby apartment Vera shares with Lottie and Anne Mae, two other aspiring actresses, was striking, the little flat being all greens and browns and sparsely furnished. Even the studio lot was really a kind of fantasy, with the prop palm tree, wooden stand in plain view, and the studio floor lamp on casters standing idle (as if a piece of electric equipment might be left out in the elements). All that was missing was a Godzilla or a gladiator walking through. The effect of it all was subtle and sly, a commentary that didn’t call attention to itself but communicated nonetheless.

The design of the second act, which combined the conference stage on the left, just three nondescript chairs as if the session were taking place in a Y or a community center, and the TV set on the right, slightly above the conference panel, far more colorful in the ‘70s style of pop psychedelia. The technical complexity came from the backing of the two sets—a large screen that doubled as a movie screen where we see the final moment, the death scene, from The Belle of New Orleans, a black-and-white melodrama (created by Tony Gerber) in the vein of, say Raintree County or Jezebel, and a TV monitor on which we were supposed to be watching the tape of The Brad Donovan Show. (The TV show is performed live for us, but when the tape is “stopped” so the conference panelists can discuss some small point, the screen displayed a frozen moment of the show as the live actors struck and held the same pose. It was a clever little gimmick, as designed by Shawn Sagady, and I imagine not too easy to accomplish smoothly.) So, we have the live medium of the stage along with evocations of both film and television; there were also some still photos projected on the screen as the panelists touch on some of Vera’s private life off the screen. Some of this may sound gimmicky, but it all worked—and in such an innately static act, it added the illusion of movement—while still being theatrical. (See what I mean? If someone had done such a scene in a film, it would have just been real, not intriguing or interesting, just plain real—a movie within a movie and a TV show in a movie. This was not real, but it was genuine nonetheless.

The costumes, by ESosa (for Emilio Sosa), were just as appropriate as the sets, and like the sets, the most impressive (and delightful) were the ‘30s designs of the first act. Starlet Gloria’s gowns were stunning, and bore the same slightly fantasy gloss as did Patel’s first-act sets. Vera and her friends also wear clothes that, though they may be less glamorous, are still part movie dream and part reality. (Anne Mae’s dress in her first scene, when she’s getting ready for a date, is especially evocative. She’s getting by by passing herself off as a Brazilian exotic, and the frilly, layered skirt has just a touch of Carmen Miranda—without gaudy colors or the bananas on her head.) In act two, the costumes become more grounded, though their evocation of character is just as strong—the aggressive poet’s combat motif, for example. The one stand-out exception is Vera’s costume—and Vera, the character, is wearing a costume—for the Brad Donovan interview. A little drunk and 40 years older than she was in act one, Vera totters onto the talk show set in a pink-and-green-and-yellow-and-God-knows-what-all caftan-cum-muumuu (with matching headband) which flutters pretty much on its own, though Vera gives it a lot of help. If the woman weren’t the center of attention on her own, that get-up would have done the trick! Like the set design, Sosa commented on the characters and the circumstances without being blunt about it.

Now, to the acting. I don’t remember seeing a play in quite some time in which the entire ensemble was all working on the same level as consistently as this one. We hadn’t gotten farther than the second and third scenes when Diana and I were whispering to each other how good the actors were. (It started with the appearance of Lottie, played by a remarkable Kimberly Hébert Gregory—who returned as Carmen Levy-Green, the academic in the act two conference.) Though Sanaa Lathan as Vera gives a stunning and flawless performance, as strong and determined as she is emotionally vulnerable—and her turn on the talk show as a kind of Eartha Kitt on speed is priceless—her castmates each give her a solid and engaging base to work from. (I can only assume that Nottage chose the title character’s name on purpose: Vera means ‘true’ in Latin and Italian and Stark means ‘strong’ in German. Vera’s a woman who’s true and strong.) I should refine a remark I made earlier while discussing the writing: the characters may be intentional caricatures of types we’ve all seen often, but the performances are not clichéd or stock. Gloria, the sweetie pie starlet, may be written so that she could be played as a stereotype, but Stephanie J. Block’s rendition is genuine and sympathetic. The affection she shows for Vera as her friend—who happens to be her maid—and support is real and her angst over the role of the New Orleans belle is almost frightening. Between the actors, the director, and the playwright, all the characters are rendered with just the right recipe of parody, sincerity, and sympathy. In this cast of standouts, some that had very special moments were Daniel Breaker as Leroy Barksdale, the film director’s “man Friday” in act one, and Kevin Isola as a British rocker with a Dr. Pangloss coiffure, in the second act talk show. Breaker, who also plays the conference host (a blend of Gene Shalit and Cornel West, The Hollywood Reporter described him), makes the smarmy self-promoter with genuine ambitions an engaging and charming man (who becomes Vera’s first husband between the acts). He looks brash and aggressive—his marcelled hair is just right—but his tone is almost suppliant, as if he were saying that he truly liked Vera and really hoped she’d like him. Isola, in an altogether different vein, was a demanding and insistent Russian-émigré movie director, but his turn at Rhys-Davies (shades of the Profumo sex-for-info scandal in ‘60s Britain!) was part strutting Mick Jagger and part lizard-tongued Gene Simmons. Lathan’s talk-show turn as Vera is a showstopper, but she and Gregory have an inspired moment in act one when they transform themselves before our very eyes from self-possessed servers at a Hollywood party into hunched, downtrodden “Negroes of the earth” and then launch into a blues number to convice director Maximilian Von Oster they should play slaves in The Belle of New Orleans. (Sincerity? Yeah, I can fake that!) This isn’t fair, I know, because all the others had terrific moments, too—David Garrison as producer Frederick Slasvick and TV host Donovan and Karen Olivo as Anne Mae and the lesbian poet—but Breaker and Isola just had a couple of marvelous scenes, thanks to Nottage and Bonney. One impressive aspect of this work, as I suggested before, is that all the actors who played two roles not only differentiated between them, as any competent actor could do, but created two perfectly apt and well-defined characters—an accomplishment for which I give great credit to Bonney along with the actors. (It’s also important to note that Nottage did a wonderful job of separating the period sensitivities and outlooks, down to the vocabulary, among the three decades—like role-players in historical reconstructions.)

Most reviews of the New York world première production of Vera Stark were extremely positive, especially about the first act, though Ben Brantley of the New York Times had reservations, calling it a “fitful comedy” and asserting that the broad humor and the “grittier emotional detail” never quite mesh. In The Hollywood Reporter, David Rooney describes Vera Stark as “clever yet frustrating” and writes that it takes “an unsatisfying turn” when the second act moves into the 21st century and the play “deflates.” Rooney also had trouble reconciling the cartoonish humor of the screwball send-up and the analysis. Variety had similar criticisms. I disagree with these cavils. Nottage got the tone right for both her spoof of ‘30s film comedy and for the serious point she made through the humor and ridicule. (Isn’t that a time-honored literary tradition—to poke fun while making serious observations? Some guy named Swift did it—and Twain, just to mention two. Not a few dramatists, too, like Molière and Shaw—or, more currently, Yasmina Reza.)

The apparent disconnect, as Michael Feingold has it in The Village Voice, between act one and act two, when the style changes some, didn’t pull me up—all three scenes (the 1933 Hollywood, the 1973 talk show, the 2003 academic conference) were all satires, filtered through the sensibility of each era. What reviewers like Rooney seem to have missed is that Nottage isn’t just sending up the Hollywood of the ‘30s or examining the lives on the African-American actors trying to navigate the gated world. In the second part of the play, she’s looking critically at the way we turn flawed people into legends and use them as vessels for our own aspirations and agendas. That’s what Brad Donovan and Peter Rhys-Davies do in 1973 and the three conference panelists do in 2003—and Nottage is showing us how we all do it. Vera may be little more than a washed up drunk pretending she’s still 25, but we project onto her a whole wealth of fun-house nostalgia because we need her to have been a hero so we can stand on her shoulders. The first act of Vera Stark isn’t just a funny send-up of screwball depression Hollywood. It’s the material on which act two comments, like the commentary in the Talmud or the critical analysis that follows and draws on a piece of literature. The two parts of Vera Stark aren’t discontinuous; they fit together like two halves of a torn photograph. Besides, what saved even the frisson of discontinuity from splitting the play, is the way Nottage got her critical intent across by means of the jokes and parody not around or in spite of them. “Clever” is something of a put-down; By The Way, Meet Vera Stark is far more than merely clever. It has something to say, and it does so very successfully as far as I’m concerned—anything to the contrary is just bitchin’ and moanin’.