By the way, Vera Stark isn't a very good play

The talented women of By the Way, Meet Vera Stark. Photos: Johnathan Carr

I've long maintained that the celebrated Lynn Nottage is more pedagogue than playwright - and I think that after seeing By the Way, Meet Vera Stark (at the Lyric Stage through April 27), few could disagree. For this time the author is quite openly at the lecture podium, laser pointer in hand.  It's true she ribs her lesson plan a little (or rather the academics from whom she's cribbing), but this cannot disguise the fact that Vera Stark is full of familiar, self-indulgent conceits - and as a dramatic construction it's pretty rudimentary.  Still, you could argue that as PowerPoint, it sometimes sings.

What's too bad about Nottage's failure is that she's actually on to a resonant theme - the plight of generations of African-American actors and actresses locked into stereotypic roles on the silver screen (just as their brothers and sisters were locked into subservient roles in society at large).  And at first the author seems to be exploring an intriguing angle on this embedded racism; we meet her heroine, the "forgotten" Vera Stark, while she's running lines for a fictitious Jezebel mash-up called The Belle of New Orleans with her employer, the (likewise fictitious) Hollywood actress Gloria Mitchell.

Gloria, of course, is playing the southern belle; Vera's her sassy maid.  When the line readings end, however, we realize Vera is actually Gloria's maid, in real life; indeed, they're a team - Gloria's got the looks, Vera's got the brains.  Or rather the mixed-race Gloria has the white looks, while Vera has the talent; they're related (cousins, perhaps?), and started out in show business as a single vaudeville act.  But Gloria's "high yaller" skin tone allowed her to slip under the color bar  - so now she is essentially auditioning for the role of Scarlett O'Hara, with her darker, more capable cousin tagging along, hoping to play the maid!  Or actually hoping to play anything - as one of Vera's buddies puts it when she hears of the impending screen tests, "Are there any slaves?  With lines?"

The real Vera Stark? An uncredited Theresa Harris sings "St. Louis Blues" to Barbara Stanwyck in the 1936 Banjo on My Knee.

Again - this is a solid set-up, and it's hardly far-fetched; Hollywood star Merle Oberon, for instance, passed off her Indian mother as her maid for years.  Nottage herself has acknowledged the great actress Theresa Harris, who played Bette Davis' maid in Jezebel, as the inspiration for Vera (although a different, more complicated parallel could be found in the career of Fredi Washington, who in 1934's Imitation of Life played a mixed-race woman "passing" for white). Indeed, Nottage's concept is so rich that for a while she can coast on it, with witty cameos of other black girls just a shade darker than Gloria working the "Lena Horne/Brazilian" angle, even as clueless Hollywood producers wax poetic about "authentic Negroes" (while all the African-Americans around them helplessly "audition" to play these racist caricatures).

As I said, this is all good satiric fun - but it's not actually drama, it's sketch comedy.  And, like the academic colloquy that concludes the play, it all feels recycled (indeed SNL and "In Living Color" covered all this territory decades ago). The real drama here would lie in Vera and Gloria's relationship; but Nottage's sense of sisterly solidarity prevents her from digging into this with anything deeper than a few sarcastic jabs.  Rather obviously her first act should climax with Vera self-demeaningly keeping Gloria's secret under duress - in order to win a crack at the big time, in however low a role (with her internal conflict setting up the second act in turn).  But as usual for Ms. Nottage, nothing like a climax ever comes close to occurring in either act (indeed, as in Ruined and Intimate Apparel, this dramatist seems unconcerned with even the basics of dramatic development).

Bette Davis suffers in white before a crowd of racial stereotypes in Jezebel, the movie Vera Stark lampoons.

Still, the witty surface of Nottage's dialogue (and she is often funny) disguises for most people the structural problems lurking in her play. (Sigh; why does "development" always polish a play without actually improving it?)  It's not until the second act, in which Vera's slow career collapse - and eventual disappearance - is documented with free-floating postmodern tropes (films within films within television shows, and an academic discussion group deconstructing it all) that things fall apart, because there's no through-line, no actual dramatic connection with Vera.  Nottage tries to cover her tracks here by having her talking (egg)heads insist the key to Vera's crack-up lies in "what was unspoken" - but again, as Nottage never actually dramatizes this struggle to remain silent, these lines read more as excuse than explication.

I will say, however, in Nottage's defense, that under Summer L. Williams' direction, Vera is hardly given its due at the Lyric.  Full disclosure here - Williams, a leading force at Company One, has long campaigned against me and my blog, and been vociferous in claiming that I'm racist. I disagree, needless to say, but if what I've written so far - or what I'm about to write - disturbs you in so far as it reflects a white male critic assessing black female artists, by all means, tell yourself (as Ms. Williams does) that I'm racist, and you'll feel more comfortable about everything.  Frankly, by now I almost don't mind that particular slur, I've written part of the theatrical community off in this regard, and they've done the same to me. So we kind of co-exist on parallel planes - I continue to pursue dramatic criticism, they continue to claim that's racist when it comes to them.

Still keeping secrets in the 70's.

With that said, let's move on to Williams' direction - which is not all it could, or should, be.  To her credit, Williams has brought a number of exciting new faces to the Lyric - I hope to see the wonderfully knowing Lindsay Allyn Cox, the brashly sweet Terrell Donnell Sledge, the smartly exotic Kris Sidberry, and the hilariously gonzo Gregory Balla on this stage again sometime soon.  But at the same time, Williams has miscast (and misdirected) Lyric mainstay Kelby T. Akin, and more importantly, under-directed star Kami Rushell Smith (Vera) and Hannah Husband (Gloria).  

Husband paints in broad strokes throughout, suggesting little sense of private conspiracy with Vera; but it's Smith who's most at sea.  Her beaming intelligence (and lovely voice) serve her well in the first act, but she flails in the second, which attempts to limn her metastasizing bitterness as her career crashes into further racial roadblocks (while Gloria, indemnified by now as whiter than white, soars into the arms of some British cultural scion).  Here costume designer Tyler Kinney must shoulder some blame (David Towlun does much better by the set, and Johnathan Carr's screen simulations of Jezebel are witty); my inner drag queen tells me that poor Vera should look like a train-wreck by the time she appears at the end of her career on a Merv-Griffin-like talk show (soon she will strip naked on a Vegas stage before vanishing for good).  But neither Vera's outfit, nor her outlook, suggests she's inches from the precipice (or that Gloria's final betrayal will push her over it).  Smith simply hasn't found within herself the conflicts that, yes, go unspoken, but should still be informing her performance every minute. The bottom line is that there's brilliant work on the edges of By the Way, Meet Vera Stark - so it's really too bad its center doesn't hold.

Lynn Nottage's civil war of the sexes

The damaged women of Ruined.

I've been dragging my feet over reviewing Ruined (now at the Huntington Theatre) because . . . well, because the horror of the situation it accurately presents made me feel a little guilty about not liking it more. Plus even I'm getting a little tired of my pointing out the artistic flaws in shows that everybody else has decided are awesome.  And what's the use of analyzing Ruined at this point, anyhow?  It's already won just about every prize there is to win (although how it nabbed a Pulitzer, which is supposedly reserved for plays 'about American life,' I've no idea). [Correction! It turns out the Pulitzer rules state it is meant for plays "preferably about American life."]  And I have to admit that the play is big, and complicated - and undeniably powerful, at least in a sensational way.  To most critics, that makes it a slam-dunk.

I'll even admit that Ruined marks a big step up in terms of craft for its playwright, Lynn Nottage - at least when compared to Intimate Apparel (the only other script of hers I can recall playing in Boston) which was blunt and simplistic by comparison.  In Ruined, Nottage juggles far more characters (if not all that deftly), but more importantly, introduces far more complexity into her victimhood politics. There's some credible back and forth about situational ethics, and her central character, Mama Nadi, a madam who services both sides of the ongoing strife in the Congo, is treated with some irony - or at least, not unmixed sympathy.  She's nothing compared to Brecht's Mother Courage (her supposed model), but by millennial playwriting standards, she's of some interest.  This is more than enough to convince most theatrical observers that Nottage has graduated from P.C. agitprop to genuine art.

But alas, a little voice somewhere in my head tells me that Ruined is still P.C. agitprop; Nottage's simulation of actual art is often so artful, however, that the difference may be meaningless - and probably only a handful of people in Boston would appreciate such a distinction anyhow (there certainly aren't enough of us to fill a house the size of the Huntington; hence, the theatre's dilemma).  What troubles me most about the play, though - even as agitprop - is that Nottage doesn't really bring to life the specific hell that is the Congo, because she seems unable to draw convincing male characters (she's kind of like the black, female David Mamet; the opposite sex is a threatening mystery to her).  Thus the opposing forces sweeping through Mama Nadi's bordello are largely undifferentiated (although we see lots of sparring and jockeying for power between them).  And when and if the playwright allows a male character to break from the pack (as she does once or twice), and actively resist the horrible things that Men do, she seems unable to give him any convincing lines to explain himself.

Now certainly Men do horrible things.  But what has been going on in the Congo is SO horrible - even by masculine standards - that it cries out for some kind of explanation, or at least investigation.  When a playwright conjures scenes (which I trust are accurate) of men chaining women to trees and gang-raping them, or "ruining" their genitals with sabers, I expect some sort of treatment of this behavior beyond the victim wailing "WHY ARE MEN THIS WAY?" (which is all that Nottage seems to have to say on the subject).

For is the kind of blood bath the Congo has endured really an expression of the essential truth about men?  Put another way - is rape in time of war a revelation of man's true nature, or a revelation of an aberration from it? Before you decide, imagine  for a moment a play about Nazi Germany that ended with the cry, "WHY ARE ALL EUROPEANS THIS WAY?" and you'll begin to appreciate the problem I have with Ruined; we don't think of the history of the concentration camps (or, say, the genocide in Rwanda), as telling us the basic truth about mankind - so why should we feel differently about the Congo?   In a word, the horrors there are embedded in some kind of context that Nottage never makes clear - the men there may not "be" this way, but got this way, somehow; yet neither her women nor her men ever explicitly ponder their political or moral circumstances (again, this ain't Brecht).

But to be honest, I'm not sure Nottage is really all that interested in the Congo per se, or the ethics of war, either - and at any rate, she seems pretty disinterested in the atrocities that have been endured by the men of the region. Indeed, we get the distinct impression that for Nottage, the suffering of women counts more than that of men - and that the savagery reigning in the Congo simply offered her a chance to pound home her thesis that rape is the masculine norm with a more intense palette than usual.

And Nottage certainly knows from intense.  She's the kind of playwright who tops herself in a scene in which a scimitar is about to be thrust into a struggling woman's vagina by having another woman, pouring blood, stumble onto the scene after a botched self-abortion.  (You're glad she stopped there, just short of Bret Easton Ellis, in the vaginal-torture sweepstakes.)  But oddly, Nottage also seems to want to show the audience a good time (Hey, we want to sell some tickets here!, you can almost hear her thinking) - so the mayhem is often interrupted by dances and songs, and she wraps the show with an improbable shot of uplift.  I have to admit, however, the audience seemed to like this curious format; they seemed to appreciate the fact that although the point of the show was that sexual violence was the norm for men, at least that wasn't like a total downer.

If you haven't guessed by now that I found the whole extravaganza rather strange - well, I found the whole extravaganza rather strange.  BUT, if even one person who sees it becomes sensitized to the ongoing trauma in Africa, then Lynn Nottage has done some good.  And you can't argue with the quality of the Huntington's production (mounted in cooperation with the La Jolla Playhouse and Berkeley Rep). Liesl Tommy's direction was taught yet detailed, and Tonye Patano delivered an award-worthy performance as the hearty, hard-bargaining, Mama Nadi.  She was matched, however, by the trio of women playing her demoralized (or mutilated) charges: the sweet-voiced Carla Duren, the heartbroken Pascale Armand, and particularly the live-wire Zainab Jah (who I believe has the makings of Cleopatra in her) were all just about note-perfect.  The men, as noted, had far less to work with, but at least Oberon K.A. Adjepong (at right, with Patano), skillfully managed, as one of the rare sympathetic Y-chromosome bearers on stage, to make his part more believable than perhaps the playwright deserved.