Sanaa Lathan has played in some great roles, but she's best remembered for her part in movie Love and Basketball.
Her new role in the Off-Broadway play, By The way, Meet Vera Stark, could prove to be eerily similar.
In the play, Lathan earns a part in her first movie that ultimately becomes her most important role that folks were still discussing many years later.
The play covers 70 years of black Hollywood stereotypes in a sometimes funny, sometimes caustic script. The blockbuster movie Vera Stark makes in the 1930s came to a head in a terse talk show program in the 1970s that was discussed by a trio of black intellectuals in the early 2000s.
In Act 1, Lathan played a feisty maid and actress wannbe Vera Stark, who catered to a Hollywood female leading lady that she had a secret relationship with. After the intermission, Vera Stark, was 40 years older, not very stable, but still with a sharp tongue as she was a guest on a television talk show that was still a hot topic 30 years later.
The production had a few unique elements including great period costumes and sets, clever multimedia clips, and a small cast with a few actors playing more than one role – one character in the 1930 set of Act 1, and another in Act 2 as a character on either the 1970 talk show or as one of the intellectuals talking about the 1970 talk show in 2003.
Being an Off-Broadway play in a small theater, most of the upcoming shows are sold out. My guess is that the play will make it to a large theater in the future.
It's that good.
Did you see the play?
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