By The Way, Meet Vera Stark by Lynn Nottage (review)

The West Coast premiere of By the Way, Meet Vera Stark placed Lynn Nottage’s latest play geographically in its intuitive performance context. In her first play since Ruined (2008)—the award-winning drama set in an African brothel—Nottage turns from drama to satire and from international concerns to the lives of black women in the twentieth-century United States, specifically within the film industry and American academia. The Geffen Playhouse, situated just west of Hollywood and nestled directly adjacent to the campus of UCLA, was a natural venue for interrogating these themes. Jo Bonney, who staged the play in its 2011 New York debut, also directed this production, and Sanaa Lathan, whose sensitive performance and impeccable comic timing were crucial to the play’s original success, reprised her role as the fictional classic Hollywood actress

Vera Stark. Benefiting from proximity to the play’s Hollywood setting, this production effectively employed multimedia elements and a winking acting style to not only present the structural inequalities faced by black actresses, but also to deconstruct the politics of representation that determine how historical archives are interpreted in the present.

Vera Stark’s two acts take place not only in different time periods, but in drastically different tonal and generic registers. The first act takes the form of a broad show-business comedy in which Vera, a black maid and aspiring actress in 1933 Hollywood, attempts to secure the elusive and coveted role of a “slave—with lines!”—the best role available to her. In the second act, staged as an academic conference panel in 2011, three scholars debate the significance of Vera’s life and work in African American representation, calling into question the ethics and legacy of her artistic choices. If the first act seems to follow the conventions of a feminist biography play that recovers the complex life of a woman who will not be given her due by the historical record, the second act could be said to deconstruct that biographical recovery. By portraying scholars whose careers rest on interpreting Vera’s legacy, Nottage insistently foregrounds the impossibility of accessing the truth of historical lives.

Amanda Detmer (Gloria) and Sanaa Lathan (Vera Stark) in By the Way, Meet Vera Stark. (Photo: Michael Lamont.)

In the production at the Geffen, the themes of history’s slipperiness and the necessary fictions attendant to underrepresented archives were effectively highlighted by multimedia elements in the play’s second act. A collection of 1930s-style film clips, scratchy interview footage, and photographs, all created by Tony Gerber and projected on screens behind the panelists, made up the “archival remains” of Vera Stark. Inclusion of this footage asked the audience to consider the wide gap between what can be captured on recorded media and the lived experience of history. Indeed, the Vera that can be reconstructed from these media artifacts appeared much less real than the embodied Vera that the audience saw onstage. The gap between the two underscored the fact that as the panelists debate what happened to her, they are really arguing about what she means—her complicated legacy, her burden of representation, and the relationship of the artist to the community—rather than gaining access to her reality as a historical actor.

The presentational—at times, even farcical—performance style further contributed to the production’s deconstruction of the historian’s or biographer’s fantasy of simple motivations and accessible meanings. In the Hollywood of Vera Stark, every character is working an angle, from Vera’s vapid white actress-employer Gloria (Amanda Detmer), to Vera’s witty, classically trained roommate Lottie (Kimberly Hebert Gregory), to Vera herself. Their self-consciously heightened performances call into question the very idea of an unmediated, authentic historical reality. From the opening moments, in which Vera, in a maid’s uniform, and Gloria, in a gaudy dressing gown, run affectedly melodramatic lines for an upcoming film, the audience was invited to laugh...