“Slaves with Lines!”
Am I an admirer of Lynn Nottage, the two-time Pulitzer-winning
(for Ruined and Sweat),
socially relevant playwright now enjoying a Residency 1 season at the Signature
Theatre? Am I also fascinated by old
movies, the mostly black and white ones you see on TMC? And does film history
and its sociological implications turn me on? The answer to all three is yes.
So why, although I really looked forward to our meeting, did the Signature’s revival
of Nottage’s 2011 By the Way, Meet
Vera Stark, a satirically serious look at Hollywood’s treatment of black
actresses, do so only half way? |
| Jessica Frances Dukes, Jenni Barber. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
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| Jessica Frances Dukes, Heather Alicia Simms. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
Gloria, “America’s Little Sweetie Pie,” who’s anxious to break
into serious roles, lives in a fashionable art deco home, while Vera shares a plain,
small flat with two other black actresses, the plump Lottie McBride (Heather
Alicia Simms, Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine) and the slenderly sexy Anna Mae Simpkins (Carra Patterson, Jitney). The
latter’s so fair-skinned she passes herself off as a heavily accented Brazilian
sexpot on a date with a German director, Maximillian Von Oster (Manoel
Felciano, Sweeney Todd). Vera, meanwhile, has a flirtation with Leroy Barksdale (Warner
Miller), a slickly dressed chauffeur and musician.
 |
| Warner Miller, Jessica Frances Dukes. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
During a party at Gloria’s home, serviced by Lottie and Vera,
dressed as maids, the egotistical Von Oster—accompanied by the be-gowned Anna
Mae—quarrels with the crass studio head, Mr. Slasvick (David Turner, Sunday in the Park with George), over how the slaves are to be depicted (happy or downtrodden) in the director’s ambitious new antebellum plantation movie, The Belle of New Orleans.
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| David Turner, Jenni Barber, Carra Patterson, Manoel Felciano, Jessica Frances Dukes. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
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| David Turner, Manoel Felciano. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
Hoping to land parts in this pre-Hays Code film in which the blacks will
have richer roles (“slaves with lines!”) than those of the slaves they typically
get in such projects, Lottie and Vera put on fake accents and slumping postures
to prove to the director they’ve got the beaten, slave-descended, Negro “authenticity”
he’s seeking, i.e., centuries “of oppression in the hunch of their shoulders.”
 |
| Jessica Frances Dukes, Jenni Barber, Heather Alicia Simms. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
Act Two of the two hour and 15-minute play shifts gears
grindingly, not unlike the recent Slave
Play. It begins with the
closing scene of Von Oster’s The Belle of
New Orleans, a stereotypically sentimental deathbed scene, filmed in black
and white. In it, the octoroon heroine, played by Gloria, passes away as her
comforting servant, played by Vera, who—in her star-making but career-shackling
performance—watches over her. Standing by are characters played by Anna Mae and
Lottie.
 |
| Warner Miller. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
 |
| Carra Patterson, Heather Alicia Simms, Warner Miller. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
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| David Turner, Jessica Frances Dukes, Manoel Felciano. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
 |
| Jessica Frances Dukes, Jenni Barber. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
Nottage’s intelligence, wit, and craftsmanship are writ
large throughout the play, but its stylistic leaps along the spectrum from
farce to realism do little to draw one into its world and lots to keep one at a
distance. Nor does director Kamilah Forbes’s attractively mounted but barely
nuanced production manage to find a tone that consistently ties its disparate
scenes together.
With a few exceptions, the approach is forced farce, seeking
laughs by egregiously overstated comic acting, and excessive shouting, which
pulls focus from Nottage’s ideas. It’s the kind of thing that Spike Lee might
have pulled off; instead, like the improvised audition scene, it comes off here
more like a cartoon of a cartoon. (It’s also yet another production demonstrating
my pet peeve about the lost art of onstage cigarette smoking.)
Set designer Clint Ramos avoids the full use of the very
wide Irene Diamond Stage by introducing a space-delimiting, semicircular cyclorama
to partially surround a turntable holding expertly realized locales: movie-star
chic, Depression-period digs, a sound stage exterior, and 70s talk-show
overkill. Dede M. Ayite’s costumes offer period-crossing eye candy, Matt Frey’s
lighting ties it all together, and both Mikaal Sulaiman’s sound design and
Daniel Kluger’s music make solid contributions.
If you’re uninterested in this production or unable to
attend, you can get Nottage’s point much more succinctly by clicking on two dryly
amusing, tongue-in-cheek, metatheatrical websites, Finding Vera Stark, credited
to the faux Prof. Levy-Green, with its faux-biography of Vera and faux-trailer
for The Belle of New Orleans, and Rediscovering Vera Stark, narrated
by Peter Bogdanovich who's credited as the faux-Herb Forrester. One wonders if a similarly
straight-faced comedic production might not have provided a more appropriate theatrical meeting with By the Way, Meet Vera Stark.
Pershing Square Signature Center/Irene Diamond Stage
480 W. 42nd St., NYC
Through March 10
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