Sierra Marcks as Gloria Mitchell-1930s and Adanna Kenlow as Vera Stark-1930s. Photos courtesy of Michael Hardy Photography.
By The Way Meet Vera Stark has within it the premise for a great play. It has humor, pathos and a topical subject to boot. Unfortunately, it is also wildly uneven. While a great play could (and still should) be written about the sometimes celebrated and always marginalized lives and careers of the many black actors who made films during Hollywood’s Golden Age, Vera Stark is not that play. Written by Lynn Nottage and under the direction of Gregory Cohen, Stark swims effortlessly through Act One only to sink under the weight of miscasting and a skewed focus in the play’s second act.
Act One of Vera Stark is the far more conventional and in the case of this production, the far more enjoyable of the play’s two acts. Set In 1933, the act introduces Ms. Stark as a young twenty-something black actress who moved to Hollywood with hopes of getting into films. Befriending and sometimes coming to race-divided odds with a highly successful white actress named Gloria Mitchell, Stark struggles to make a living while continually striving for her big break: a role in a major motion picture. When Ms. Mitchell is asked to audition for a new “Southern Epic” called The Belle of New Orleans, Stark does everything in her power to land a role in it as well. What follows forever changes the course of Stark’s life and career.
While the act is sometimes painfully self-aware and suffers from an inconsistency and inability to find its own style, it is pleasant and entertaining to watch. It is also often very funny and even charming in spite of those things, drawing humor from scenarios that make us think, albeit not too long and not too deeply. The act does, however, suggest that it is preparing for something bigger, more subversive and possibly more biting in Act Two, but this is something we never see materialize.
Robert Agiu as Peter Rhys-Davies, Lorraine Winslow as Gloria Mitchell-1970s, Veronica Bryant as Vera Stark-1970s and Skip Blas as Brad Donovan.
Act Two jumps forward to the year 2003 and takes place at a colloquium about Ms. Stark’s life and her mysterious disappearance in her seventies. Using Stark’s last filmed interview (which is staged live here) from 1973 as its basis, the act takes the subjects of media, race and sex that Act One effectively addressed lightheartedly, and turns them into an obvious and pedantic snooze-fest.
When confronted with this second act, director Gregory Cohan gets totally lost, losing any sense of believability in the play’s characters, overusing canned TV sound effects, miscasting the older versions of Stark and Mitchell (both actresses recited their lines as though they were reading them for the first time) and shifting tonal gears with as much grace as a teenager driving stick shift for the first time.
Though the older actresses’ performances did draw attention to themselves, it’s fair to say that everyone, even those who did a serviceable job in Act One, seemed nearly as lost as they did in the second act. It also doesn’t help that the different characters the actors play in Act Two are drastically underwritten except for Stark herself. Maybe there was a lack of time in rehearsals or a series of misguided directions from Cohen. Either way, there must be other older actresses in Long Beach or neighboring cities who could have filled the roles of the older Stark and Mitchell with more dignity. I also don’t understand why Cohen wouldn’t have just cast the younger actresses from the first act as their characters’ older selves. Act Two is already odd enough as it’s written and something should have been done to save it.
Speaking of the two younger actresses, being the only two actors spared from appearing in Act Two as different characters, their performances come across more evenly than most of the rest of the cast.
While Sierra Marcks plays Gloria Mitchell a bit too by-the-books, failing to grasp some of the insecurities that the script suggests lie below her character’s surface, she nonetheless has strong comedic timing in her more tender moments with Stark, a welcome vulnerability.
On the other hand, Adanna Kenlow’s performance as the young Vera Stark is nearly pitch perfect. Ms. Kenlow always takes her time with the material, delivering it with a refreshing sense of discovery and has an undeniably charismatic presence. It’s always a pleasure whenever Kenlow is on the stage, which makes me wish she had been cast as Stark’s older self as well. I have faith that Kenlow would have further delivered the goods.
Besides Kenlow, the most consistent and appealing performance was from Bryan Allen Taylor as Leroy Barksdale, a brass player, chauffeur and eventually, Drake’s first husband. The scene where the two of them meet on a Hollywood back lot suggests the kind of subtle character piece Vera Drake could have been, and when the two characters talk about civil rights and the black struggle in Hollywood, it’s the only time you may actually become emotionally invested in the themes of this story. It doesn’t hurt that the chemistry between the two of them is palpable and effortless. Even in the second act Taylor seems to be the only person who knows what he’s doing, trying to single-handedly keep the entire play from diving off the deep end. He is, however, the only actor playing dual roles who comes out unscathed.
While Cohen has a tendency to ham things up in the first act, the playful, natural charisma of his actors, nearly all of which shine, help carry things along. In Act Two, without the structure of a typical narrative, Cohen loses his footing and also loses us. The strangeness of the material in no way helps the cause, but this staging was flawed.
However, the production elements were all excellent. In fact this production was aesthetically some of the better work I’ve seen on The Playhouse’s Mainstage. The costumes by Donna Fritsche were all era appropriate and well suited to the actors who wore them, and the set design (Sean Gray) and light design (Elisheva S. Siegel) were functional and attractive.
Andrew Vonderschmitt, who is also the executive and producing artistic director for The Playhouse, designed a plethora of evocative projections that were used throughout. The well-shot film footage contributed by Brooks Davis was appropriate to the period.
It’s frustrating to see a play that is full of great ideas yet is unable to ascend to the heights it aspires to. The roles of black people in the media and the history of black Hollywood will likely continue to spawn plays, films, books and so on. Often infusing those works with humor is a winning tactic.
Humor is a brilliant way to get under people’s skin and entice them to evaluate big questions. Recently, Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained served as a wonderful example of a narrative story that subverted its subject matter and (with ample doses of self-awareness) made its audience both laugh and think. It did a far better job of addressing not just the atrocious nature of black slavery in America but also the stereotypes in Hollywood cinema long after slavery’s abolition.
Vera Stark by no means wishes to be, nor did it ever aspire to be, something as pop, as violent or as irreverent as Django, but both narratives are cut from the same cloth. Yet, in the era of Ferguson and now Baltimore, to cut out the violence of the black American’s narrative and talk only intellectually of these issues as in the second act of Vera Stark, we do Ms. Stark’s fictional story, and the stories her character represents, a great disservice. Stark was a radical, yet the most interesting and heart-wrenching events of her life are only given lip service in Meet Vera Stark. This is a failing by the playwright and one that the Long Beach Playhouse’s production is hopeless to reverse.
The second act ends in a tidy but profound manner with a flashback to the young Vera Stark talking to the young Gloria Mitchell about infusing the subtext of a screenplay’s lines with purpose and meaning. All good actors are aware of this practice, but in this scene and with this play, the subtext is about issues bigger than those of a three dimensional character. As we go through life, there are times when our voices are compromised and we are not able or allowed to speak with the fullness of truth that we may wish for. Vera Stark informed her roles with a purpose and sub-textual meaning that kept people talking about her for years to come. For this play to even begin to hint at that subtext, it needs to be infused with the same.
Alas for Ms. Stark’s sake, this play is not quite worthy of her struggle, but her struggle is quite worthy on its own. Vera Stark’s voice will still be heard, and when it is, we will have no choice but to listen.