While you’re at it, meet Hattie McDaniel.
Lynn Nottage has said that her play By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, which opened in revival tonight as part of her residency season at the Signature Theatre, is partially inspired by 1933’s Baby Face, which featured the African-American actress Theresa Harris (nicknamed, ugh, “The Beautiful Maid”) alongside star Barbara Stanwyck. But Vera Stark, at least early in Nottage’s play, can’t help being read as a version of McDaniel, the first African-American woman to win an Academy Award, for her portrayal of Mammy in Gone With the Wind. “I’d rather make $700 a week playing a maid than $7 a week being a maid,” McDaniel famously told those who criticized her for playing such stereotypical roles. And so says Vera here, decades after she starred in a beloved southern melodrama (in which she famously pulled tight her mistress’s corset): “Should I not have taken that role and cleaned toilets and made beds in someone’s home instead?”
[Read Melissa Rose Bernardo’s ★★★ review here.]
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.
In this elegant production, directed by Kamilah Forbes, it is ultimately much as it was in its 2011 debut at the Second Stage: funny, smart, frequently clever, and ultimately successful in achieving only some of its goals.
As the play opens, we meet Vera (the fantastic Jessica Frances Dukes), who is both maid to and scene partner of the kewpie-doll blonde Gloria Mitchell (Jenni Barber). They’re in a grand, white Hollywood Regency living room (the sets are by Clint Ramos), and you can’t quite tell if this is real life or a movie scene. It’s practice running lines, you soon realize, and Vera, indeed Gloria’s maid, and far more disciplined than, ugh, “America’s little sweetie pie,”, has acting ambitions, too. In the next scene, we see Vera at home with her roommates, the zaftig singer Lottie McBride (Heather Alicia Simms) and the flirtatious Anna Mae Simpkins (Carra Patterson). All three have backgrounds as performers, all three are working menial Depression-era jobs, all three have ambition. By the next scene, we’re into high screwball, as Vera and Lottie, working as domestics at a dinner party for Vera, a director, and a studio boss, lean into stereotypes in hopes of landing a part in their movie — and Anna Mae, light-skinned, arrives on the director’s arm, reinvented as a Latin beauty.
The second act opens with a clip of the film — heightened, ridiculous, Selznickian — and then moves to a modern-day academic discussion of the movie and Vera’s role in it. That discussion is interspersed with clips from Vera’s last final interview, an early-70s appearance on a Merv Griffin-like talk show, in which she appears drunk and wearing a dramatic, enormous Pucci-meets-diaspora gown. (This scene-stealer is the work of costume designer Dede M. Ayite.) Gloria shows up to surprise her, and both, now aged, continue playing stylized versions of themselves. Eventually they get to some accommodation, and suggest some hint of racial-justice uplift in their old film. They also maybe, gingerly, hint at some shocking secret they share. The academics — the performers from Act One, amusingly transformed for their double roles — bicker among themselves, tediously.
Nottage is, of course, a wildly talented playwright. Prior to Vera Stark she won a Pulitzer Prize for Ruined; after it, she won another for Sweat. But Vera Stark is most reminiscent of her earlier Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine (which was the first revival of her Signature season, earlier this year). They are two plays that deal with black women’s identities, and the constructed identities of her two lead characters, but, more than that, they are two plays in a similar style, a whipsawed mix of realism and absurdity. And here it doesn’t always work.
The two main set pieces are wonderful: the perfectly executed screwball scene at the end of Act One, when more people keep showing up, farce-style, and adapting themselves to work an angle. (“How come nobody in Los Angeles actually does what they do?” Vera asks at one point.) And Vera’s regally self-dramatizing turn as the grand-dame talk-show guest is simply sensational, a riveting portrait of what this life has done to her, sensationally acted. But 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.
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.
By the Way, Meet Vera Stark opened February 19, 2019, at Signature Center and runs through March 10. Tickets and information: signaturetheatre.org
