Hollywood's condescending and racist attitude toward black performers gets a comical pie in the face from Lynn Nottage, the 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winner for Ruined. By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, opens in 1933, when "America's Little Sweetie Pie," Gloria Mitchell (the captivating Amanda Detmar), a blonde, ditzy Southern belle, is getting ready to star in a sudsy tale set on a Louisiana plantation in slavery times.
Helping her to learn lines and stay off the bottle, is her maid Vera Stark (the estimable Sanaa Lathan). Vera and her two roommates, Lottie (Kimberly Hebert Gregory) and Anna Mae (Merle Dandridge), spend their time scheming how they can land roles in the movie, even though they know they will be depicted as minstrel-show buffoons.
Stark perseveres and, like the real-life actress she is based upon -- Theresa Harris, who appeared in the 1930 “Babyface” -- she excels in The Belle of New Orleans and manages to land other roles over the next few years, only to mysteriously disappear from view.
In the second half of Vera Stark, Nottage tries to solve the mystery by jumping ahead in time to 1973, when Vera, now a drunken pop singer, is interviewed by an unctuous TV host (Spencer Garrett, who played an emigre film director in the first act).
Then there is another time jump, to 2003, when a panel of film critics, led by the Cornel West-lookalike Kevin T. Carroll, spouts all kinds of pompous nonsense about blacks in Hollywood.
Vera Stark goes all over the place but somehow manages to stay funny while doing it. Nottage is helped greatly by the Geffen's slick production: shimmering set and costumes, a cleverly-done film sequence from “The Belle of New Orleans,” shot by Tony Gerber.
