Ace plays race card in 'Meet Vera Stark'

Two years ago, Lynn Nottage won a Pulitzer Prize for "Ruined," a devastating fiction based on horrible stories of sexual mutilation as warfare in Congo.

In tone, of course, "By the Way, Meet Vera Stark," her screwball comedy about a black actress in Hollywood, is worlds away from the horrors of "Ruined." And yet, Nottage has hardly taken a lazy vacation from revelations about reality.

In this remarkable new work, Nottage has created an imaginary biography based on 70 years of movie history and, for all the humor, personalizes layer after layer of cultural assumptions into fact.

That black actresses were stuck playing slaves and maids is no big news. But Nottage ingeniously structures the piece into at least four separate times and styles. The first act, set in 1933, introduces struggling actress and maid Vera (the extraordinarily chameleonic Sanaa Lathan) as she preps Gloria, her over-the-hill starlet boss (Stephanie J. Block), for a screen test for a big Old South epic.

Everyone, but especially the black actors, is directed by the ever-surprising Jo Bonney to overact in the first half, a squirm-making style that, in retrospect, is a parody inside a parody of Hollywood's racial stereotypes. The intentions get clarified after intermission, first with a wondrous black-and-white film of the epic, co-starring Vera as the slave. This intersects with an incisive satire of a 2003 academic panel on Vera's trailblazing -- or stereotypical -- career and an eerily authentic re-creation of a boozy and loose Vera on an awful TV talk show in 1973.

If this sounds contrived, forget I said it. "Vera Stark" breezes by with the playfulness of a Russian nesting doll, each image reflecting on the previous ones while entertaining on its own.

Block is pretty broad in the comic style of the first act, but we forgive her when, years later, Gloria reunites with Vera on TV. Karen Olivo (Anita in "West Side Story") shows tremendous range as a light-skinned black actress who passes as a bombshell Brazilian and as a radical-feminist academic.

Sets by Neil Patel and costumes by ESosa make time-traveling seem easy, which it clearly wasn't for Vera as she discovered what she was willing to do to be a star.WHAT "By the Way, Meet Vera Stark"