David Ives's "Venus In Fur' at Philadelphia Theatre Co. (1st review)

Thomas, a struggling playwright/director, can't find a suitable actress for his latest project: an adaptation of an 1870 novel by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch about the pleasures and pitfalls of mutual degradation between a man and a woman.

"I saw 35 incompetent actresses today," he laments. "What ever happened to femininity?"

He's about to call it quits when into his rented audition studio bursts Vanda, a foul-mouthed, hyperactive galoomph who seems at first glance to epitomize his complaint. Vanda is all flailing arms and legs and boobs, like a platypus coming in for a landing or Ann Miller or Bette Midler on steroids.

She's hours late for her audition (stuck on the subway, she claims); she hasn't made an appointment; she's barely glanced at the script and betrays no indication that she understands it; she has dressed for the occasion in a black-leather dominatrix costume straight out of a pornographic peep show; and she seems utterly devoid of any grounding in Victorian culture, Classical Greek culture, or any culture, period. She doesn't even know the difference between "ambivalent" and "ambiguous."

Role reversals

Yet once the reading begins, this 21st-Century airhead slips instantly and perfectly into the embodiment of her repressed 19th-Century character (also named Vanda). And as the audition proceeds, it gradually dawns on us that the goofy Vanda understands Thomas's play, as well as the Sacher-Masoch novel on which it's based, better than the pedantic Thomas does (she has even brought the appropriate costumes and props with her). What's more, she understands him better than he does.

Precisely because Vanda seems like such a ditz, Thomas lets down his defenses, and in short order he's a goner. In a series of role reversals, Vanda becomes his director, his psychoanalyst and ultimately his male protagonist (inducing Thomas to read the female's part). She penetrates his psyche in a way that he will never be able to penetrate her (physically or otherwise).

"How could you be so good at playing her," he wails helplessly, "and so fucking stupid about everything else?"

Belafonte's song

Throughout their 100-minute encounter, Vanda commands our attention just as she commands Thomas's fealty. By the time she's through, Vanda has irretrievably reduced Thomas to a quivering blob who gratefully kisses her feet, just like the sadomasochistic male victim in the Sacher-Masoch story, while Vanda exults, "You thought you could bend some poor ignorant actress to your program!"

What's going on here? Are we observing the consummate actress at work— putting on an act not only on stage but off? Is Venus In Fur a sophisticated 21st-Century urban update of the old Harry Belafonte calypso song, "Man Smart, Woman Smarter"? Or is Vanda something more than an actress or even a woman— is she the goddess Aphrodite herself ("Venus in Fur"), come to wreak feminist vengeance on a sexist planet?

I would have preferred my original analogy above: She's Ann Miller or Bette Midler on steroids. Miller and Midler were (are) entertainers who instinctively understood that brains and sex appeal need not be mutually exclusive. The essential point about any male-female encounter is that the two sexes really are wired differently, and consequently neither one entirely comprehends the other, and each is vulnerable to the other. That's the story of, that's the glory of love.

Obama's marriage

Or as Barack Obama put it years ago, when he was a little known and newly married Illinois State Senator: "Sometimes, when we're lying together, I look at her and I feel dizzy with the realization that here is another distinct person from me, who has memories, origins, thoughts, feelings that are different from my own. That tension between familiarity and mystery meshes something strong between us. Even if one builds a life together based on trust, attentiveness and mutual support, I think that it's important that a partner continues to surprise."

Vanda, goodness knows, is a veritable bundle of mysteries and surprises; her problem as a character is that nothing seems to surprise her. She's just too omniscient to be credible as a human— or, if she's not a human but a goddess in human form, then what's the point, other than to indulge vicarious revenge fantasies for angry women in the audience?

Palpable tension

Venus In Fur is an intense, perceptive, provocative, often very funny, sometimes brilliant one-act comedy-drama by an incisive playwright (David Ives) who perceives the dance of seduction between the sexes as the ultimate dramatic conflict. The electric tension between Mark Alhadeff as Thomas and Jenni Putney as Vanda is often palpable. It kept me up much of the night thinking about it. But ultimately Venus In Fur is the sort of work whose process is more important than its product.

Of course, that's what life is all about— process, not endings tied in neat bundles. Even if its engaging pieces don't quite hang together, I would readily see Venus In Fur again with friends, if only to argue with them afterward about its meaning.

Better still, I wish someone had videotaped the auditions for Venus In Fur. An audition for a play about an audition for a play in which an actor destroys the director— now, there's something different.♦


To read another review by Marshall A.Ledger, click here.
To read a response, click here.
To read a related commentary by Naomi Orwin, click here.