| . | 01/31/2010
Venus in Fur
By: Victor Gluck
Nina Arianda and Wes Bentley in a scene from Venus in Fur
(Photo credit: Joan Marcus)
When Leopold von Sacher-Masoch wrote Venus im Pelz, usually translated in English as Venus in Furs, it was taken as serious literature back in 1870. Ironically, this forgotten novella (which provoked a scandal in its own time) has come to be classified as backroom erotica and the author’s name has given us the word “masochism.”
The novel, which is told as a story-within-a-story, recounts how young Severin von Kusiemski’s complete and total infatuation with Wanda (pronounced “Vanda”) von Dunajew leads to him signing a contract for her to debase him and treat him as her slave, and the tragedy that results. Today, masochism has come to be seen as a psycho-sexual condition thanks to Kraft-Ebbing, but Sacher-Masoch may have been simply writing an investigation of love as a power struggle.
Playwright David Ives has made a career of two types of scripts: clever original contemporary comedies, strong on satire, and adaptations of classic Broadway musicals for concert stagings at New York City Center Encores! of which he has completed 28. In his latest comedy, Venus in Fur, being given its local premiere at the Classic Stage Company, he has given Sacher-Masoch’s novella a modern interpretation. In order to make the material both shocking and contemporary, he has transferred the story from the bedroom to a modern rehearsal hall, another setting where one person may choose to dominate another, and has a male director and a female performer rehearse a play based on the events and dialogue of the novel.
Staged by oft collaborator Walter Bobbie, Venus in Fur is both clever and provocative. On one level, it examines the battle of the sexes. On another, it asks us to look at the inherent male domination in many heterosexual relationships. Finally, it portrays the rehearsal room itself as a sadomasochistic experience in which one person, a director, attempts to dominate another, the performer, who is told what to do without recourse to her own feelings or intelligence.
Thomas (played by Wes Bentley, best known for his performance as the teenage hero in the film American Beauty) is a playwright-director who has just finished for the day his auditions for his stage adaptation of Venus in Fur (sic). In walks actress Vanda Jordan (Nina Arianda) who is late for her audition although she is not on Thomas’ list. Vanda is reduced to begging. When she finally gets Thomas to agree to read with her, they are both struck by the fact that both she and the character she is to play have the same unusual name. As they read, it becomes obvious that Vanda is letter perfect in the role and that she has come highly prepared with costumes for both of them.
The current production is not entirely successful for several reasons. As the play is rehearsed, the line blurs between the performers and the S&M relationship they are portraying. First, the director orders the actress around; then while he and the actress rehearse they take on the roles of the masochist young man and the goddess-dominatrix from Sacher-Masoch’s novel. Then they step out of character and discuss the relationship under way in contemporary terms, bringing up both their own personal love relationships (parodied by their abusive cell phone calls) and how women are treated both at home and in the theater today.
Then little by little, the actress begins to take over the reins and make suggestions as to how the director (supposedly no actor) should play his hero. Ives is almost too clever wanting it to work both ways: the actress is both one who has been dominated by male directors but who subtly ends up ordering her director around as she tries to get him to dig deeper into the character he is reading in the script rather than just be her rehearsal partner.
Another level of the play which is not fully explored is that Vanda eventually claims not to be who she said she was at the beginning. How did she get the script in advance? What is her real motivation for confronting Thomas both in his role as Sacher-Masoch’s Severin and as a male-chauvinist in his professional life? Or does she have some other ax to grind? The play stops before we ever find out. It leaves a frisson of expectation as actor and actress have become Severin and Vanda, but it does make the play seem unsatisfying, as though it were the exploring of a premise, rather than a finished work.
The casting and direction is also off-beat and that may be part of the problem. Bentley gives a very flat performance as the playwright-director for almost three-quarters of the play, until Vanda orders him to really play the role. This may have been how the script is written and how he has been directed, but it is very difficult for a partner if one actor is giving little or nothing.
On the other hand, Ives’ Vanda, like Sacher-Masoch’s original, is supposed to be aristocratic, elegant, refined. By no stretch of the imagination could Nina Arianda’s performance enacting the 19th century woman be said to be aristocratic. Her actress is foul-mouthed, light-headed, unread, disorganized. She is magnetic, fascinating, varied, shifting moods and ideas in the blink of an eye, but she is not the aristocratic woman who so absorbs the young man. Are Ives and Bobbie satirizing the idea that audiences believe performers play themselves, or has this element not been thought through very well?
Peter Kaczorowski’s brutal lighting for the rehearsal space with its long rows of fluorescent lighting gives a clinical feel to the play as though the characters are under a microscope, which in a sense is what a rehearsal studio tries to accomplish. Anita Yavich has amusingly provided Vanda with a carry-all of period-appropriate outfits she claims to have just picked up on the way to the audition at a thrift shop. John Lee Beatty’s rehearsal room with its few pieces of furniture works beautifully for suggesting the world of Sacher-Masoch’s 1870 story as well as the 2010 rehearsal hall. The crashes of thunder from outside the windowless room designed by Acme Sound Partners create sudden shocks that break the illusion being played out by the actors rehearsing and bring us back to our current reality.
David Ives’ Venus in Fur is a fascinating investigation into the power plays that are love relationships. It also investigates the idea that the rehearsal room is a sadomasochistic environment. It further suggests that we all have the capability of being both sadist and masochist depending on the situation. Although Ives’ new play tires to work on too many levels, it is an ambitious and clever attempt to turn Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s classic work into to a startling contemporary experience.
Venus in Fur (through February 21)
Classic Stage Company, 136 E. 13th Street, in Manhattan
For tickets, call 212-352-3101 or http://www.classicstage.org
|
|