For a play about a former maid, “Vera Stark” is not especially orderly. (In 2011, my colleague Ben Brantley called it “fitful” and that’s true, but as a woman who rarely bothers to make a bed, I can live with creases.) But it is such a good show — so clever, so playful, so keen to shapeshift and timeslip and whiz through half a dozen separate genres, and did you see Clint Ramos’s set and Dede M. Ayite’s costumes? — that I spent the next several days trying to figure out why it isn’t an absolutely great one.
Would I rank it with Ms. Nottage’s best plays, “Ruined,” say, or “Sweat,” Pulitzer Prize-winners both? Twist my arm: No, not quite.
Maybe that’s because “Vera Stark” depends on a kind of absence. We see Vera in various contexts — as servant, as friend, as aspiring actress and bantering back lot doll. In these scenes she mostly plays herself, except when she’s trying to charm a director who doesn’t want to hire a black woman unless he can see “100 years of oppression in the hunch of her shoulders.” But that self is fluid, mutable.
All of the female characters are. Lottie, a drab seamstress, used to do the shimmy on Broadway and before that she played Juliet. Vera’s other roommate, Anna Mae (Carra Patterson), softens her consonants and opens her vowels and passes as Brazilian. Gloria passes as a sweetie pie, and as other things, too. But Vera contains more multitudes than most. She keeps shifting out of focus.
It’s not that the performances aren’t vivid. Ms. Dukes, a sensation in “Bootycandy” and “Is God Is,” is crafty and dynamic. Ms. Barber, a former Glinda, is amusingly witchy, Ms. Patterson zingy, Ms. Simms a wry gift. (The men aren’t so bad themselves.) But these first-act characters have had to meet Hollywood’s male gaze with whatever it wanted to see. No wonder their edges go blurry.
The production tries to counter this. There are a few attempts to pinion Vera, but something in the character keeps sliding out and away. She’s too slippery for real tragedy, too evasive for farce. She’s the screen before the projector warms up, ready to show us whatever woman our imperfect hearts can dream.
