I will confess to being a little obsessed with maid–turned–movie star Vera Stark, the fictional subject of Lynn Nottage’s 2011 play By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, now being revived at off-Broadway’s Signature Theatre.
Again, she is fictional. (Though Nottage has said one of her inspirations was Theresa Harris, a prolific African-American actress in 1930s–40s Hollywood, who spent her career in a series of stereotypical servant roles.) But if you go to the website Finding Vera Stark, there’s a whole treasure trove of information about Nottage’s fictional screen star: a biography (“Vera’s maternal grandmother was the legendary music hall singer and contortionist, Ida ‘Burnt Pretzel’ McCleary”); a trailer for the fictional film The Belle of New Orleans, the movie that purportedly kick-started Vera’s career; Vera Stark artifacts, including a newspaper clipping detailing her arrest for public indecency in Las Vegas; images and music from black vaudeville (as a youngster, Vera toured on the circuit); an extensive filmography; and, hilariously, an interview with Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Lynn Nottage, author of the play By the Way, Meet Vera Stark.
But wait—there’s more! The website Rediscovering Vera Stark features a minidoc, “A Leading Lady in a Maid’s Uniform: A Closer Look at The Belle of New Orleans,” which includes commentary from Peter Bogdanovich; a program from her scandal-plagued stint in Folies Bergere at the Hotel Tropicana in Las Vegas (remember that public indecency arrest?); and an excerpt from Vera’s autobiography, It Rained on My Parade.
[Read Jesse Oxfeld’s ★★★ review here.]
Vera Stark—played by the dynamite Jessica Frances Dukes (who you might remember as the bedridden, blood-thirsty mother in 2018’s Is God Is)—is one of the juiciest characters Lynn Nottage has ever written. Though Esther in Intimate Apparel and Undine in Fabulation or, The Re-Education of Undine are right up there. (Side note: When are we going to get a revival of Intimate Apparel, Nottage’s best work?) As a play, however, Vera Stark is one of Nottage’s least cohesive—enjoyable and zany, but uncharacteristically uneven.
In Act 1, we meet aspiring actress Vera: She’s working as a maid to pouty, privileged, peroxide-blond movie star Gloria Mitchell (Jenni Barber), aka “America’s little sweetie pie.” Spoiler: Gloria is no longer little or sweet, and when she asks for a lemonade, she means gin. Vera, meanwhile, is dying to get a part in the big Southern epic Gloria’s screen-testing for, The Belle of New Orleans. As she tells her actress-turned-seamstress friend Lottie McBride (Heather Alicia Simms), “a couple of the Negroes actually get to say something other than ‘yes’um’ and ‘no’um.’” But before anyone gets cast in anything, Gloria must throw a soirée in her gloriously tacky home, suck up to studio head Mr. Slasvick (David Turner), and impress the hot-tempered director Maximillian Von Oster (Manoel Feliciano). And because Nottage has set her play in Hollywood in the 1930s, the whole shebang has a screwball-comedy feel: Vera is shimmying and singing “Gimme a Pigfoot and a Bottle of Beer” when Slasvick walks in looking for a seltzer; Vera and Lottie’s rooming-house pal Anna Mae Simpkins (Carra Patterson)—a fair-skinned serial dater (“hussy” in Lottie speak) pretending to be Brazilian—arrives at the party on Von Oster’s arm; a guy who’d caught Vera’s eye at the studio, Leroy Barksdale (Warner Miller)—Man Friday by day, musician by night—rolls in unexpectedly, only to get propositioned by America’s not-so-sweetie pie; and Von Oster and Slasvick get in a screaming match over art versus commerce that culminates in the number-crunching boss exclaiming: “All I’m asking is that if you’re gonna give ’em slaves, give ’em happy ones.”
Act 2, however, is like an entirely different play. It starts with a gorgeous black-and-white scene—the pivotal death scene—from The Belle of New Orleans, starring Gloria as a sickly octoroon, Anna Mae as a thick-accented Frenchwoman (naturally), Lottie as a slave, and Vera as Tilly, the dying heroine’s maid and confidante. It’s just a clip to preface a 2003 discussion moderated by the very jumpy “filmmaker, musician and entrepreneur from Oakland” Herb Forrester (Miller again); his two guests—both of whom he will frequently interrupt and talk over—are “journalist, poet and performer” Afua Assata Ejobo (Patterson) and media/gender studies professor Carmen Levy-Green (Simms). When they’re not getting mansplained to, Afua and Carmen share their dueling theories on what happened to Vera: Afua thinks she overdosed on pills and liquor in a Reno hotel room; Carmen is convinced she spoke to Vera in a Santa Monica homeless shelter. Herb, for his part, doesn’t really care: “Ultimately she was just another shucking, jiving, fumbling, mumbling, laughing, shuffling, pancake-making, Mammy in the kitchen.”
When the trio isn’t being pretentious, they’re viewing “footage” from what is believed to be Vera’s last interview, an appearance on The Brad Donovan Show in 1973. Ostensibly the crooning, martini-sipping Vera is there to plug her Vegas nightclub act, but that trickster Donovan (Turner) has decided to stage a surprise reunion between Vera and Gloria. Vera is not amused. Especially when he sums up their careers thusly: “Gloria, you were one of the biggest and brightest stars in Hollywood, and Vera well you…you lit up scenes with your memorable sassy presence.” Nottage gives us the reunion/confrontation we want: Gloria and Vera—one on the verge of retirement, one on the edge of obscurity. (They even break into their old vaudeville act, “I’m Just Wild About Harry.” Yes, their old act.) But Nottage keeps pressing pause on the interview, and going back to the panelists. If only we could fast-forward through those blowhards and get back to the real drama: Vera.
By the Way, Meet Vera Stark opened Feb. 19, 2019, and runs through March 10 at the Pershing Square Signature Center. Tickets and information: signaturetheatre.org
