BWW Reviews: Geffen Playhouse Plays Host to Vera Stark
By: Don Grigware Oct. 02, 2012
By the Way, Meet Vera Stark/by Lynn Nottage/directed by Jo Bonney/Geffen Playhouse/through October 28
Toward the end of the second act of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage's By The Way, Meet Vera Stark, a character shouts, "It's not what's said, it's what's not said!" This could be a tagline to describe the show, which is light and funny in its first act, and far more serious in the second, when film is utilized to tell more of the life of Vera Stark and dark questions are raised and not always answered.
At the beginning of the play, which begins in 1933, we meet Vera, a lovely young "Negro" maid, played with humor, strength and grace by Sanaa Lathan, trying to help her employer, "America's Sweetie Pie," the blond and beautiful but overwrought Gloria Mitchell (Amanda Detmer, in an appropriately hammy performance) as she struggles to learn her lines for an audition for a major new film, The Belle of New Orleans. The film is about a consumptive octoroon virgin in a Louisiana whorehouse trying to hide the "shame" of her heritage and the loyal black servant who loves her and tries to comfort her mistress on her deathbed. We soon learn that Vera Stark is an aspiring actress who would do anything to get the part of the servant. Art imitates life, life imitates art.
Also in Vera's life are two roommates. Anna Mae is a black woman light-skinned enough to pass for white. She's pretending to be a spitfire from Venezuela and she's dating that director. Lovely Merle Dandridge plays her sexily and voluptuously, amusingly impervious to the glares sent her way during the party by Vera and her other roommate, Lottie. Lottie, a "woman of girth" and an actress once much slimmer and more successful, is played hilariously by Kimberly Hébert Gregory, who nearly steals the show as she reprises one of her vaudeville numbers. She, too, wants a part in the film. ("Slaves? With lines?!") When Vera, Anna Mae, Lottie, Gloria, and the film's producer and director (played as wicked send-ups of Louis B. Mayer and Curtis Reinhardt with thick Russian and German accents by Spencer Garrett and Mather Zickel) meet at Gloria's party, what ensues is uproarious. The pretentious director wants his actors not to be actors but real people: Negroes who have suffered and carry that suffering on their stooped shoulders. When Vera and Lottie assume the poses of downtrodden slaves to impress him, it is truly hilarious.
The second act comes as a surprise, if not a shock: we are propelled seventy years into the future (2003), and then back to 1973, when we find out what happened to Vera and Gloria in the forty years since the movie was made. It's not a pretty picture.
By the Way, Meet Vera Stark is an inventive, enjoyable mixed-media play about contrasts-black and white, young and old, rich and poor, pretension and truth. Playwright Nottage deftly combines nearly slapstick comedy with real questions about relationships between the haves and the have-nots. The cast is uniformly superb; those with dual roles handle both with sometimes stunning contrast. A standout is Kevin T. Carroll, who in a brief scene portrays Vera's broken husband very movingly. The direction by Jo Bonney is crisp, the sets by Neil Patel and the costumes by ESosa are gorgeous and perfectly reflective of the kind of glamorous trappings of those 1930s films about the very rich. (Except for Vera's apartment, which well reflects her station in life.)
If you want to laugh a lot and think some, I recommend By the Way, Meet Vera Stark at the Geffen Playhouse through October 28th.
- guest reviewer James Spada
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