“By the Way, Meet Vera Stark” is on the Alliance Theatre mainstage Oct. 16-Nov. 10.
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On her Twitter account, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage describes herself as “playwright, theatremaker and activist.” On her website, the adjectives are “playwright, hunter and gatherer.”
That gives you some idea about the woman described by critics and colleagues as “one of our finest playwrights,” “a smart, empathetic and daring storyteller” and a writer “who tells a story an audience won’t expect.”
With By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, Nottage looks at old Hollywood and the roles African-American women had in its movies — maids, cooks, domestic workers. The play, which has been called a “satire” and a “sharp-toothed comedy” dates back a few years to the night Nottage was watching an 1933 Barbara Stanwyck movie called Baby Face on Turner Classic Movies. That’s when African-American singer-actress Theresa Harris caught her eye.
Harris played Chico, the confidante of Stanwyck’s character. Their on-screen friendship knocked convention on its backside. Their relationship was fuller and far less stereotypical that what was seen in most movies of the time.
“They were sitting at the same table,” Nottage recalls. “I thought, ‘Wow, I have never seen that in a movie of the 1930s.’ It led me to investigate the role of African-American women in the ’20s and ’30s, up until today. This character became my means of investigation.”
Vera Stark is a composite, a character formed from the data Nottage’s dug up in her sleuthing. She’s part Theresa Harris, part Nina Mae McKinney (1929’s Hallelujah) and part of many other women who played minor roles in early Hollywood.
Nottage became their champion.
“I want these women to be SEEN above all else,” the playwright says. “I want their talent to be recognized. I want their struggles to be recognized.”
The Brooklyn-born Nottage, now 48, grew up going to the theatre. Although she wrote plays and staged them in her family’s living room (with her brother as her principal actor), she didn’t realize until late in college that playwriting could be a viable career for a woman. Growing up, the only woman she remembers reading was Lorraine Hansberry.
That changed when she met Paula Vogel, one of her first playwriting teachers at Brown, a mentor and a friend.
Nottage’s work, says Vogel “explores depths of humanness, the overlapping complexities of race, gender, culture and history — and the startling simplicity of desire — with a clear tenderness, with humor, with compassion.”
Both student and teacher are Pulitzer Prize winners — Nottage in 2009 for Ruined (set in Congo during its civil war), Vogel in 1998 for How I Learned to Drive. And even though women playwrights aren’t produced at the pace men are, Nottage says she can now list more than two-dozen female playwrights, both black and white, who work steadily.
Right now, Nottage is working on the libretto for an opera version of her play Intimate Apparel (seen by Alliance audiences in 2006) and early into a play about how poverty is reshaping the American myth.
Vera Stark, however, never seems far from her consciousness. The Alliance is one of seven companies staging the piece this season, and the character’s life doesn’t stop at the footlights. Her invented history is detailed on two websites — findingverastark.com and meetverastark.com — used by Nottage to continue exploring the character and the mythology of her play.
