By the Way, Meet Vera Stark (TCG Edition)

Lynn Nottage

• Publisher: Theatre Communications Group
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781559364423
• eBook ISBN: 9781559366489
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Drama
• Index: Literature

"Nottage is one of our finest playwrights, a smart, empathetic, and daring storyteller who tells a story an audience won't expect."—Time Out New York

"Lynn Nottage's work explores depths of humanness, the overlapping complexities of race, gender, culture and history—and the startling simplicity of desire—with a clear tenderness, with humor, with compassion."—Paula Vogel, Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright

In her first new play since the critically acclaimed Ruined, Lynn Nottage examines the legacy of African Americans in Hollywood in a dramatic stylistic departure from her previous work. Fluidly incorporating film and video elements into her writing for the first time, Nottage's comedy tells the story of Vera Stark, an African American maid and budding actress who has a tangled relationship with her boss, a white Hollywood star desperately grasping to hold onto her career. Stirring audiences out of complacency by tackling racial stereotyping in the entertainment industry, Nottage highlights the paradox of black actors in 1930s Hollywood while jumping back and forward in time and location in this uniquely theatrical narrative. By the Way, Meet Vera Stark premiered in New York in 2011 and will receive productions at Los Angeles's Geffen Playhouse in fall 2012 and Chicago's Goodman Theatre and The Lyric Stage Company of Boston in spring 2013.

Lynn Nottage's plays include the Pulitzer Prize–winning Ruined; Intimate ApparelFabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine; Crumbs from the Table of Joy; Las Meninas; Mud, River, Stone; Por'Knockers; and POOF!

Act One

Scene 1

A living room. Deco stylish. Hollywood, 1933.

Gloria Mitchell, twenty-eight, “white” starlet, in a dressing gown, lies across the couch nursing a healthy glass of gin.

Vera Stark, twenty-eight, an African-American beauty wearing a maid’s uniform, tentatively enters. She pauses, then ventures to speak.

VERA (With Southern accent): Mis’, Mr. Lafayette here to see ya.

(Gloria registers shock and dismay.)

GLORIA (With sweet girlish Southern accent): Tell him I’m not here. I can’t bear to face him, not like this, not now, not after all that has happened.

VERA: But, he already know ya here. Dat rascal Cassius dun tol’ him.

GLORIA: Tell him to go. Tell him I’m sleeping. Tell him anything. I can’t. No. No. I don’t want to see him.

VERA: He ain’t want me to say, but he missing ya sum’ting awful—

GLORIA: Oh, won’t you tell him to go already!

(Vera reluctantly turns to leave.)

Wait. (Tenderly) Does he look well?

VERA: He look real good, Mis’.

(Gloria smiles, wrestling with what to say.)

GLORIA: Did he bring azaleas?

VERA: You know he always do.

(Gloria gasps dramatically.)

GLORIA: And does he know? Did you tell him I’m dying?

(Gloria coughs.)

VERA: I don’t know, what he know. But I do know dat he here. Mis’, dat man out dere love you. And if you send him away now it gonna be a real shame. Ya can’t keep hiding from de worl’. Talk to him, tell him how ya feel. Tell him ya love him. ’Cause ya and I know dere ain’t no other man in your heart but him.

GLORIA: How do you put up with me?

(Gloria reaches out for Vera’s hand.)

VERA: Mis’, whatcha want me to tell him?

(A long pause, Gloria is thinking.)

Whatcha want me to tell him?

(Another long pause.)

(Irritated) Whatcha want me to tell him?

GLORIA (Dropping the Southern accent): Oh damn. What the hell am I supposed to tell him?

(Vera stares at Gloria, then consults the film script tucked away in her apron.)

Oh, give me the line already . . .

VERA: Tell him—

GLORIA: Wait!

(Gloria presses her fingers to her forehead, finally:)

(With accent, excited) Tell him to remember me on that warm summer—

VERA (Correcting): spring—

GLORIA: —day we went boating on the bayou. I was wearing that blue—

VERA (Correcting): violet—

GLORIA: sweater—

VERA (Correcting): cardigan.

GLORIA (Exasperated—dropping accent): Oh God, how am I supposed to remember these lines? They just pour out of my head like water. I reach for them and they’re gone. It’s impossible. I can’t do it.

(Gloria stands theatrically.)

These words. “Sweater.” “Cardigan.” Who gives a goddamn?

The woman is dying, why does she have to make so many speeches about it.

VERA: Because that’s what’s written, honey. And as you know the writer likes for you to say what’s written. That’s how it works.

GLORIA: Oh, I know that. Don’t you think I know that?

(Vera snatches the glass out of Gloria’s hand, and sniffs it.)

VERA: Gin? Now, let’s do it again.

(Gloria snatches the glass back.)

GLORIA: The indignity, really! Why should I have to screen-test for this film? I’ve played this role, I practically invented it. Tragic Jane with consumption, Lydia with the hole in her fragile heart, and who can forget poor stupid little Maybelle who was slowly being poisoned by her diabolical, but “winsome” husband.

VERA: Yes, we know! But, honey, this is different. It’s Marie, (Grandly) The Belle of New Orleans. I don’t have to tell you, every actress with halfway good teeth wants this role. And believe me, they’ll do whatever it takes to get it. (She suggestively wipes the corners of her mouth, and slaps her butt)

GLORIA: Hussies, I bet they will. Shame on them.

VERA: Now c’mon, pull yourself together, won’t ya. And remember what Maestro used to say in New York.

GLORIA: Yeah, yeah, the king of the pratfall-dispensing wisdom like pellets of cyanide.

VERA: Then, never mind. I have a half dozen things I can be doing.

(Vera ventures to leave.)

GLORIA: Where are you going? Vera!...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Production History
• Characters
• Act One
• Act Two
• About the Author