By the Way, Meet Vera Stark

Second Stage Theatre

New York

(212) 246-4422

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This clever take on vintage Hollywood stereotyping “could have so easily become a droning study of Discrimination in Action,” said Terry Teachout in The Wall Street Journal. Instead, as written by Lynn Nottage, it’s a “sharp-toothed comedy” that, while completely different in tone from her Pulitzer Prize–winning 2009 war drama Ruined, is no less shrewd. When we meet the title character, played by Sanaa Lathan, she is working as a maid to a 1930s white film star while harboring acting ambitions of her own. But opportunities are limited. Eventually, Vera lands a relatively choice part as a slave in a Gone With the Wind–style epic: It turns out to be the break that allows her to become one of the most successful black actresses in Hollywood by playing a long string of cheerful and servile domestics.

While the screwball-tinged satire of the first act is “brilliantly realized,” what follows is less satisfying, said Dan Bacalzo in TheaterMania.com. The second act is set at a present-day symposium where three scholars are examining Vera’s legacy and analyzing a 1973 talk-show interview that the star did after she’d devolved into a tipsy has-been. The Vera we meet in these scenes is a fascinating character, said Ben Brantley in The New York Times. Though Nottage’s parody of academic-speak “is, for the most part, flabby,” the washed-up Vera is a figure so sharply imagined and brilliantly played that she “stings.” Teetering on her high heels, “she wears the conflicted history of being marginally famous as conspicuously” as she wears her circa-1973 psychedelic-print dress.