By the Way,
Meet Vera Stark
Written by Lynn Nottage
Directed by Chuck Smith
at Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn (map)
thru June 2 | tickets: $25-$81 | more info
Check for half-price tickets
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Much ado about Nottage
Goodman Theatre presents
By the Way, Meet Vera Stark
Review by Lawrence Bommer
The one good thing in Goodman Theatre’s Chicago premiere of Pulitzer winner Lynn Nottage’s overlong By the Way, Meet Vera Stark is the first act. (Try to get half-price tickets by promising to leave at intermission.) Alas, Nottage tells us nothing new about how shabbily Hollywood treated African-Americans in the 1930s (it’s all in George Wolfe’s “The Colored Museum”), reducing Hattie McDaniel, Butterfly McQueen, and Louise Beaver to maids or mammies. But she does deliver a bracing, tautly teasing portrait of three hopeful survivors in “The Belle of New Orleans,” the putatively seminal 1935 film in which they played memorable stereotypes.
Opposing this project is studio mogul Frederick Slasyick (Patrick Clear) who, wanting Depression-era audiences to enjoy his films’ escapism, knows that “realism” would spoil the fun. Vera is joined in this semi-stupid tearjerker (depicted later in a parody of 30s overacting that makes you wonder why anyone would remember this turkey) by her roomies—tart-tongued Lottie (TaRon Patton) and race-crossing, vamp artiste Anna Mae (Amelia Workman). You’ve seen their stereotypes too.
Unfortunately, reducing Vera Stark to a bloodless docudrama, the second act makes a big mistake: It distances us from what felt vital in the first act and offers nothing in return. Worse, it congeals into a comical commentary—through a 1973 talk show and a 2003 panel about Vera Stark—on this improbably memorable film and on Vera’s mysterious disappearing act after playing over 50 so-so roles in the years after her one-time triumph. We learn more than we need to about the strife and bonding between white Gloria and black Vera. Her marriage to jazz musician Leroy Barksdale (Chike Johnson), her “man Friday,” tells us nothing special. Worse, the play’s final moment, a secret flashback to the off-camera byplay between them, delivers a contrivedly sentimental cop-out to all the pseudo- controversy we waded through in this interminable and overwritten second act.
It would have been much more enlightening for Nottage to look at what today’s stereotypes might be–it’s too easy to mock yesterday’s racist clichés or to tell us about the vaudeville TOBA (“Tough on Black Asses”) circuit where Gloria and Vera honed their art.
A sultry and driven dreamer, Perry’s Vera (“cheesecake in a brown paper bag”), more often resembles a bargain-basement Lena Horne, her mystery more implied than explored. We never see her seek anything more than what pluck and luck can give her, so it’s hard to care about what might have been. Zediker holds her own in the equally stereotypical role of the fading blonde starlet desperate for a comeback and whose famous role is just another rip-off of “Gone with the Wind” meets “Showboat.” Chuck Smith’s staging is everything this play deserves which means it comes up short.
Nottage wants to have it both ways—to write a satire about parody and still seem serious—but that’s just one more embarrassment of riches, “too much of a muchness.”
But there’s always that first act.
Rating: ★★½
By the Way, Meet Vera Stark continues through June 2nd at Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn (map), with performances Wednesdays and Thursdays at 7:30pm, Fridays 8pm, Saturdays 2 and 8pm, Sundays 2pm. Tickets are $25-$81, and are available by phone (312-443-3800) or online through their website (check for half-price tickets at Goldstar.com). More information at GoodmanTheatre.org. (Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes, includes an intermission)
 
 
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Photos by Liz Lauren
artists
cast
Tamberla Perry (Vera Stark), TaRon Patton (Lottie McBride, Carmen Levy-Green), Patrick Clear (Mr. Slasvick, Brad Donovan), Chiké Johnson (Leroy Barksdale, Herb), TaRon Patton (Lottie McBride, Carmen Levy-Green), Ron Rains (Maximillian Von Oster, Peter Rhys-Davies), Amelia Workman (Anna Mae Simpkins, Afua Assata Ejobo), Kara Zediker (Gloria Mitchell)
behind the scenes
Chuck Smith (director), Riccardo Hernández (set design), Birgit Rattenborg Wise (costume design), Robert Christen (lighting design), Joshua Horvath, Ray Nardelli (sound design), Mike Tutaj (projection design), Neena Arndt (dramaturg), Joseph Drummond (production stage manager), Rebecca Louise Fischer (stage manager), Adam Belcuore (casting), Liz Lauren (photos)
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