Friends,

By The Way, Meet Vera Stark made its off-Broadway premiere in 2011. Written in two acts by the inimitable Lynn Nottage, two-time recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, Act I begins in 1933, and is written in the style of a “1930s screwball comedy”. On the opening pages of the script, Ms Nottage describes the Act as “very fast-paced, whimsical, and always buoyant”. This was our guiding style mantra in rehearsal. Act II is no less so, but it jumps back and forth between the performative styles of 1973 and 2003.

This play is, at surface level, the 70-year history of a black film actress named Vera Stark. Inspired in part by the life and career of Theresa Harris, Vera’s fire, energy, gifts, and hope comes up over and over against an industry, a society, and a people who will not give her the recognition and opportunity she deserves. Vera is finally cast in her first big role: “Tilly”, the maid to a young “octoroon” played by budding starlet Gloria Mitchell. She and Gloria have a complicated relationship…some might call it a familial one. Other black actresses of the 1930s haunt this play, too: Hattie McDaniel (the first black woman to receive an Oscar for her work, in 1940, and the only black actress to receive the recognition until Halle Berry would accept the Award for Best Actress in 2002), Lena Horne, Ethel Waters, Nina Mae McKinney, Fredi Washington, Josephine Baker, and so many more. (See student artist Michael Chabot’s dramaturgy board outside the Premanand Theater for more context.) At a deeper level, Nottage’s story works to uncover the aggressions and microaggressions that black artists faced at the dawn of talking cinema...treatment that continues into the early 2000s and beyond. The play digs into the ways in which escapism for white America at the movies perpetuated harmful Black-American tropes, and sought to erase dangerous and cruel legacies against black people in US history.

Once Hollywood was able to produce movies with sound, the implications were immense. The Motion Picture Production Code of 1930, commonly known as the Hays Code, was crafted by the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association. It asserted that since Hollywood now crafted highly public storytelling, the film industry was therefore responsible for promoting a “moral” society. The Code strictly forbade the cinematic depiction of miscegenation, which its authors defined as “sex relationships between the white and black races.” The clause extended to include “intimate relationships” of any kind. Author-defined profanity, “excessive and lustful kissing”, and the glorification of illegal acts were forbidden in the Code, as well. Since interracial marriage was still banned in more than half of US states when the code was written, its depiction in film would imply the condoning of an illegal act. This meant that any actor who wasn’t white would have a difficult time being cast in a substantial role; many black actors and actors of color who were able to “pass” as white chose to pursue work through whatever means were available to them. Many well-known “tragic mulatto” or “octoroon” characters came from this time, when some popular films revolved around a person’s hidden black heritage causing them great tragedy and lost love. The Hays Code’s anti-miscegenation proviso stayed in place until 1956.

Nottage allows the characters in the play to ask questions about Vera’s complicity in this work: does playing an enslaved character, a maid, a servant, a “Mammy”, hold these black artists partially responsible for reinforcing stereotypes to the public? Or, as Vera says in Act II, Scene 3, should she “not have taken that role and cleaned toilets and made beds in someone’s home instead”? The characters in Act II ask us to consider whether or not nature abhors a vacuum, as the saying goes: do we create intention and meaning for someone when there is very little recorded history or legacy to support their life and work? Does the tragic absence of recorded information and resources on early black American artistry cause us to fill in the void with alternate realities, paratexts, that support modern sensibilities? Do we revise history when there’s little material to fill in the blanks?

I’m thrilled for you to see the work of new Theatre Department faculty member Tolu Ekisola helming this production in the title role, and surrounded by gifted student artists at every turn. We have some students who are absolute vets of the stage in this cast, and some who stepped onto a stage for the very first time in our first rehearsal. I am proud of and impressed by every one of them.

Thank you for being here today, and for your consideration of the questions this play asks. Central among them: what happened to Vera Stark? And what does her fate mean? We’re still asking ourselves, and we hope you will, too.

Amanda White and the By the Way, Meet Vera Stark Team