Dani Coan and Brooke Smaltz, in BY THE WAY, MEET VERA STARK. Catherine Davis Photography

RALEIGH, NC – The quotation is famous; the source, less so. “We all know that Art is not truth,” Picasso wrote in a letter to Mexican artist, writer and exhibitor Marius de Zayas. “Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.“

Yes. And then there are all the other lies, the ones that playwright Lynn Nottage gives us a glimpse of as we peer behind the star-maker machinery that was Hollywood circa 1933, at the start of her uneven historical drama By the Way, Meet Vera Stark at Theatre in the Park. Start with the exaggerated but historically accurate overacting in the initial scene, as spoiled actor Gloria Mitchell (Brooke Smaltz), crowned “America’s little sweetie pie” by Photoplay several years before, rehearses lines for a dreaded screen test with her maid, Vera Stark (Dani Coen). 

The hands-on foreheads and butter-wouldn’t-melt Southern accents are deployed here for an

Brooke Smaltz and William Kalland, in BY THE WAY, MEET VERA STARK. Photo by Catherine Davis Photography

audition for the (fictive) film The Belle of New Orleans, an antebellum melodrama meant to draw comparison with Gone With The Wind. Mitchell’s going for the lead role: Marie, a beautiful woman of mixed racial ancestry who can pass for white in the 1880s. Her character’s in love with a white merchant, but must pretend not to love him, Stark says, “in a selfless attempt to shield him from the truth about her race,” in the manner of the era’s potboilers.

But Stark wants to be in the film as well – in the role she’s playing here, as Tilly, Marie’s devoted servant and companion. Since significant speaking roles for Black actors are few and far between in 1933, a delighted Stark tells her friend, actor Lottie McBride (Gabriella Terrero), “I’ll put it this way: a couple of the Negroes actually get to say something other than ‘yes’um’ and ‘no’um’.”

Unfortunately, Stark’s professional path is much more fraught than Gloria’s – despite the fact that she’s not just a better actor than Gloria, but also her blood relative. For, as it turns, Mitchell also has mixed racial ancestry and is passing for white in Hollywood, in an era where that makes all the difference when it comes to opportunities in film. Since Stark cannot pass, she’s forced to look for the roles available for Blacks in that era: servants and slaves. 

Later, McBride spells it out: “You gotta be high yella mellow or look like you crawled outta Mississippi cotton patch to get work in this rotten town.” After seven years looking for work as a Black actor, McBride’s now resigned to “trying to eat my way into some work, looking like someone’s mammy.”

As a result, Stark works as Mitchell’s maid and scene partner, helping her prep for auditions, glimpsing the limelight while still in shadow herself. Though Mitchell could pull a string and recommend Stark, she remains noticeably lukewarm when it comes to helping Vera’s career. 

Resentful of Mitchell’s selfishness, Stark takes matters into her own hands in a mortifying but laughable sequence: a party with the film’s producer and director at Mitchell’s place. The final straw comes when Stark and McBride witness with outrage their roommate, a mooch named Anna Mae (Gabrielle Vizcaino), passing as a Brazilian film star with director Maximilian Von Oster (Joe Nussbaum). 

As Von Oster reveals that his script follows yet another disappointing, racially reductive plotline, the two maids decide to go for it, offering up hospitality with Southern spirituals and hammy dialogue in a burlesque of the oh-so-downtrodden characters Von Oster describes. “Suh, you want another drink, suh?” Stark asks, before a visibly moved Von Oster asks her, “What is your tragic story?” 

After Coen’s character dumps a fabricated history of deprivation and the most unconvincing blues song, Von Oster concludes, “This is what we need on screen! Authenticity!”

But this bonfire of the vanities turns into a dumpster fire when producer Frederick Slasvick (William Kalland) makes his studio’s agenda clear in a drunken argument with the director. Noting that the Great Depression is going on all around Hollywood’s microclimate bubble, Slasvick says, “People want to laugh, they want to cry and they want a little song-and-dance in between… But the one thing they don’t want is to feel bad about themselves. Not now, not while the economy is dying and good folks are being forced out of their homes and into the fucking gutter. People need the past, need their history to seem heroic, glorious and romantic. That is what we do, erase their pain for 90 minutes. And let’s face it, slavery ain’t exactly a pick-me-up. All I’m asking is that if you’re gonna give ‘em slaves, give ‘em happy ones.”

Gasps at these revelations didn’t just come from the other characters on stage. 

Strong performances anchor this Theatre in the Park production. Coen racks up another credit as a headstrong Vera Stark, who only grows more jaded and embittered as the decades pass – even if director Yamila Monge seems to direct more of her lines at points to the audience instead of her onstage partners. Among them, Terrero makes Lottie a solid sounding board, and Vizcaino amuses as the opportunistic Anna Mae. Preston Campbell‘s depth and range kindles romantic interest Leroy Barksdale – before his character reappears as a husk of his former self, forty years later.

Matthew Strampe’s set design for Mitchell’s art deco living room was certainly eye-catching, but the night we saw it, the running crew hadn’t yet solved how to keep its seven separate rotating panels from making scene changes drag. At least Juan Isler’s droll sound design, featuring golden era greats including Fats Waller, helped pass the time.

As it turns out, Stark and Mitchell both get their film roles, and The Belle of New Orleans becomes a box-office smash. But that success ultimately becomes a Pyrrhic victory for Stark, who can never shake the indelible image of that first film character from the public’s mind.

Nottage’s script loses focus in its odd second act, which whips back and forth like a broken windshield wiper between the 1933 film, a smarmy interview on a daytime television show from 1973, and the second burlesque of the evening: a 2003 colloquium on Stark’s career, populated by a stereotypical trio of sub-variants among pompous, self-serving academics.  

As they quarrel and pontificate while scenes veer across the decades, the disheartening story becomes clear. When American culture wasn’t ready to go further in the representations of Black characters beyond stick-figure supports and servants, Stark got stuck, thwarted in a career that never let her go where she wanted to. When a Black actor was that far ahead of her time, time weighed heavy during the decades Stark ultimately spent waiting for her culture to catch up.