The Golden Age of Hollywood is alive on stage over at Second Stage Theater. Lynn Nottage (who won a Pulitzer last year for her play Ruined which played at MTC) has put together a well written, though at times uneven study of African American actresses in the early days of cinema.
The first act is a perfect representation of what it was like for young black women fighting for screen time to say things like "Yes'm" and "no'm". Vera is an aspiring young fire cracker, who in today's Hollywood would have been cast in a picture immediately, has trouble playing even a maid in 1933. A "gone with the wind" type southern epic is being made at the studio, and every black woman in town is clamoring to play one of the slaves. There is a humorous exchange about this in the second scene.
While act I is a perfect, and comedic, outlook on what things were like, and the degradation women of color were put through in order to find work on the screen, act II takes place simultaneously in 2003, and in 1973. An expert panel is discussing some newly rediscovered footage from a 1973 TV interview at an symposium titled "Finding Vera Stark". This is where problems begin.
The play doesn't adequately draw enough parallels between the first and second act. Even though that character of Vera Stark is in front of us, albeit forty years after she first graced the scene in the aforementioned southern epic, we only get small hints of the struggle that she must have gone through in those subsequent years.
A large majority of praise must be heaped upon Sanaa Lathan who plays Vera Stark. It is through her performance alone that we can understand the struggle and the pain and heartbreak that Vera has gone through. We can see that she both loves the applause of the audience, and loathes them for what they made her do. The supporting cast is fantastic. Each person is giving a truly top notch performance. The second act does need some stronger connectivity to Act I but other than that, definitely worth checking out.
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