Venus in Fur

Last weekend I saw an excellent play by David Ives at the Lyceum Theater on Broadway. Venus in Fur is a erotic, intellectual meditation on the politics of sexual domination, combining the sexual mores of today, a classic of erotica from the Victorian era, and the goddesses of antiquity.

There are only two characters in the play, which has only one scene without intermission. A playwright and director (Hugh Dancy) is disgusted by the lack of quality actresses he has seen to cast his play, an adaptation of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Fur (usually it is known of as "Venus in Furs," like the Velvet Underground song, but Dancy's character insists it is Fur, singular). He is on his cell phone with his fiancee as thunder and lightning rage outside the small rented studio he has used for the audition: "No young women, or young-ish women. No beautiful-slash-sexy women. No sexy-slash-articular women with some classical training and a particle of brain in their skulls."

He is ready to pack up and leave when Vanda (Nina Arianda) busts through the door, wearing S&M clothing and full of excuses about rain, late subways, and frottage on the train. She is like a bull in a china shop, and not even performing Hedda Gabler at the Urinal Theater impresses Dancy. She seems to epitomize every stereotype about dumb actresses, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire and The Bacchae need to be explained to her. But she is such a force of nature that she persuades Dancy to read with her.

It soon becomes apparent that she knows the play better than he thought she did, as she is able to recite lines off book. The character's name from Sacher-Masoch's book is also called Vanda, and they read together through much of the action, a play-within-a-play. The book is about a man who longs to be dominated by a woman, and Vanda takes him up on it, though the essence of power is ambiguous (not ambivalent, as Arianda frequently misstates). As Arianda points out, "He keeps saying she's got all this power over him. But he's the one with the power, not her. The more he submits, the more control he's got over her. It's weird." I can attest to that, as when I wrote for Penthouse Variations, which often featured tales of both male and female domination, the submissive partner is actually the one in control--it's called "topping from below."

When Arianda is playing the Sacher-Masoch Vanda she purrs with a Teutonic accent, and Dancy slowly becomes transfixed. Slowly, inexorably, the power shifts, and Arianda owns the upper hand. Soon he is begging her to stay and read to the end, and he ends up taking off her boots and putting on thigh-high leather boots that can be found in any dominatrix's dungeon in New York City. It's a quiet but electrifying moment.

Ives is clearly an erudite fellow. I wonder, totally without any knowledge, whether he considered adapting Sacher-Masoch's book (written in 1870, it was a sensation, considered pornography, and the author's name gave us the word "masochism") as a stage play, but like Charlie Kaufman trying to adapt The Orchid Thief, and ending up writing a movie about a writer trying to adapt the book (and getting Adaptation out of it), Ives ended up with this more interesting hybrid.

As I watched the play, completely enthralled, I wondered where it was going and was taken on many diversions. The actual ending fulfills the dictum that an ending should be inevitable, but unpredictable, and there are clues along the way. A key line is spoken by Arianda early on: "And Vanda really is Venus, right? Am I crazy? She's like Venus in disguise or something, come down to get him. To like, torture him."

Lest you think this is some academic exercise, don't be put off. This has a lot of comic, crowd-pleasing lines, from Arianda's vivid profanity to the line that ends up on the t-shirt for sale in the lobby: "You don't have to tell me about sadomasochism. I'm in the theater."

Under the direction of Walter Bobbie, the performances are great. Dancy is overshadowed by Arianda, but this is has it must be. He is, at heart, ineffectual, and he speaks pedantically but with the underlying fear that he doesn't know what he's talking about. Arianda steals the show, and should win a Tony. She has to play two parts, sometimes going from role to role on a dime--the coarse actress to the sophisticated lady in fur. She excels at both. Arianda is not what one would term a conventional beauty, and indeed when she auditioned for the part it was as it is in the play--an actress trying out for a part she believed she would never get. But Arianda, like Vanda in Venus in Fur, must have wowed them so much they couldn't say no. Keep an eye out for her in future projects, she should be a star.