Theatre in Review: By the Way, Meet Vera Stark (Second Stage)

	Stephanie J. Block and Sanaa Lathan. Photo: Joan Marcus

I'm beginning to think that Lynn Nottage is some kind of multiple personality. It's almost inconceivable that the woman who gave us the poignant Intimate Apparel and the scalding Ruined has come up with By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, which, The Book of Mormon aside, is as ruthless and sustained a piece of satire as we have seen in some time. And, unlike the authors of The Book of Mormon, Nottage isn't taking any prisoners. Instead, she takes a crowbar to any and all received ideas about the history of black actors in Hollywood's golden age; she's even rougher on those who study that history and theorize about it for a living.

Nottage's time-tripping screwball comedy begins in 1933, in the Hollywood home of movie star Gloria Mitchell, who is preparing for a screen test with the help of Vera Stark, her black maid. Gloria is as histrionic a diva off-screen as she is on. "You are being overly dramatic again," she reprimands Vera, while gracefully flinging herself on the floor. It's no wonder that Gloria is a little over the top, considering the whopper of a secret that she is sitting on: She and Vera are, in fact, cousins -- and, possibly, half sisters. Gloria hasn't just settled for passing as white; she has reinvented herself as "America's little sweetie-pie," whose cloying mannerisms combine the worst excesses of Norma Shearer, Irene Dunne, and Olivia DeHavilland, with a touch of the adult Mary Pickford thrown in for good measure.

The role for which Gloria is auditioning is the title character of The Belle of New Orleans, a creaky melodrama about a Creole call girl who falls for a wealthy white man, then expires in a haze of glory, surrounded by her weeping servants. Vera, who's hot for a movie career of her own, wants to get in on The Belle of New Orleans, too -- as she tells her roommate Lottie, another frustrated actress, the script isn't just loaded with slaves, it features "slaves with lines" -- and, realizing that Gloria will be no help, she decides to take matters into her own hands.

Thus Vera and Lottie show up at Gloria's, ostensibly to serve martinis at her cocktail party but really to impress the film's director, Maximillian Von Oster, a colossal artistic poseur, who wants to make The Belle of New Orleans into a gritty exposé of brothels and slavery, filmed where it happened and featuring non-professionals. The sight of the sophisticated, wisecracking Vera and Lottie trying to pass themselves off as downtrodden darkies from the Mississippi Delta provides some of the play's tastiest moments. The evening gets even more complicated when Maximillian's date is revealed to be Annie Mae, a friend of Vera's, pretending, as usual, to be a Brazilian bombshell. Of course, all these deceptions are staged in the home of a black woman passing for white, who is angling to land the role of a black woman passing for white. As Vera says, "Welcome to the hall of mirrors, honey."

The head-swiveling second act begins with an uproarious screening of the finale of The Belle of New Orleans, starring Gloreia, supported by Vera, Lottie, and Annie Mae. (The scene positively percolates with hidden meanings suggestive of their real-life relationships.) Suddenly, it's 2003 and we're at an academic symposium about Vera's career. (The Belle of New Orleans, we learn, became a classic and launched her on a multi-decade career playing servant/confidantes to a bevy of white leading ladies.) Vera disappeared years earlier, and a panel is convened to study her last public appearance, on a television talk show in 1973. This sequence, staged live, presents Vera as a boozy, broken-down dame in her '70s, clad in a Pucci-printed, marabou-fringed muumuu and croaking her way through "Fly Me to the Moon." In a This-is-Your-Life moment, the host produces Gloria, now grandly exiled to London. The meeting between Gloria, still guarding her secrets, and the alcoholic loose cannon known as Vera, is, predictably, a disaster, providing rich material for our academic panel, who subject it to all sorts of approaches - feminist analysis, queer theory, radical politics, and straight-up semiotics - none of which aids the cause of clarity.

This kind of intellectual prank needs plenty of style to succeed and Jo Bonney's production is loaded with it, thanks to a nimble cast and a team of inventive designers. Sanaa Lathan captures the young Vera's deadly accurate assessment of the way of the world. ("As you know," she tells the forgetful Gloria, "the writer likes you to say what's written. That's how it works.") And she is devastating as the ruined, bitter Vera of 1973, still furiously reminding everyone that she marched with Martin Luther King. Kimberly Herbert Gregory matches Lathan laugh for laugh as Lottie, who often launches into impromptu spirituals to demonstrate how "authentic" a Negro she can be. Stephanie J. Block's Gloria is a riotous portrait of a movieland narcissist; I particularly love the way she bursts into gales of affected laughter before making an entrance at her own party. Karen Olivio amuses with Annie Mae's transparent that-lady-from-Rio act, and she tops herself in Act II as a fierce theorist named Afua Assata Ejobo, dressed in her best Cuban guerilla drag.

The men have less colorful roles, but David Garrison is spot-on as both a bemused studio head and as a wicked parody of Mike Douglas. Daniel Breaker is equally suave as a chauffeur and aspiring composer who romances Vera and as the domineering host of the Vera Stark symposium. Kevin Isola scores as the pontificating Maxmillian and as an Iggy Pop-style rock star who thinks the older Vera is positively groovy.

The play needs, and gets, an ambitious production design. Neil Patel's scenic concept places several different locations -- Gloria's home, Vera's apartment, the set of the talk show -- inside a movie studio environment, complete with scenic wagons and movie cameras. Jeff Croiter's lighting alternates Los Angeles sunshine with shadowy on-set looks. ESosa's costumes include representative pieces from the '30s, '70s, and early 2000s, as well as the antebellum era. Tony Gerber's lengthy and elaborate film sequence from The Belle of New Orleans has a remarkably authentic look and sound; Shawn Sagady's projections impose a grainy film quality on certain scenes and also provide some attention-getting freeze-frame images from the talk show. John Gromada's sound design includes evocative musical sequences spoofing the Max Steiner school of film scoring.

I suppose there will be those who complain that Vera Stark, with its decades-hopping structure and commentary-ridden second act, is largely an intellectual exercise, lacking in any emotional pull. But satire this pointed and deadly accurate doesn't come along every day, and Nottage's utter impatience with cant of any kind is, to my mind, exhilarating. Anyway, the play ends with a flashback to 1933 screen test, closing with a close up of Vera's face that is, in its ambiguity, both moving and a little bit chilling. She doesn't know it, but she's on the cusp of a moment that will prove a triumph and also a disaster over the years to come. It's just about the only moment when the laughter stops in By the Way, Meet Vera Stark.--David Barbour