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.]
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