Usually I enjoy nothing more in a dramatic plot than clever structure, especially if it’s inventive, purposeful and involves real, interesting characters. Venus in Furis clever to a fault, and the fault is repetition. That doesn’t come off as well as intended, maybe because the playwright often tries for a thrill or puzzle-a-moment.
The setting is a realistic, dreary New York City rehearsal room with windows that let in only graying light from the storm outside. On the phone, director Thomas decries the ineptitude of actresses auditioning for a play entitled and adapted from a late-19th century S & M fiction, “Venus in Fur.”
A seemingly totally unsuitable actress named Vanda, like the novella’s Venus, barges in late but dismisses Thomas’ dismissal of her by a brilliant beginning reading of lines. Thomas letting her persist is the first instance of a shift of power as the two proceed to the based-on-the-novel play-within-the-play within Ives’ play.
All the fictions consist of erotic drama, like pulp romance pursuing a submission/dominance struggle between man and woman. As a modern character, Vanda begins the series of reversals -- from a classic bimbo to a serious actress who’s done research to a mysterious link with the fictional heroine Vanda and the mythical Venus.
Both Thomas and Vanda are mercurial, and each play others who change seemingly as if by whim. Are their relationships physically abrasive or pleasurable? Sexually dangerous or the opposite? Is their attraction to each other and to the audience hot and steamy or more wrinkly than crackling? Or don’t all these reverse from time to time, as do heated emotions and quick wit?
Like his chameleon characters, writer Ives goes between broad and not-so-broad comedy and serious drama. His allusions are important, for classical Venus is not only goddess of love, beauty, fertility but also sex, especially seductive sex.
As dramaturg, Lauren Sasso’s well-written and researched program materials show, Venus traditionally appears nude. The Sacher-Masoch 1870 novella, however, referred to Titian’s 16th century Venus with a Mirror just unwrapping herself from a shawl before cherubs of love. And Ives has Vanda go from shawl to lace and garters and kinky boots. She offers all of Venus’ enticements -- though only in the beginning, prosperity.
That Ives originally intended to adapt for the stage “The Story of O” is also instructive. In that tale of female submission, the “heroine” permits her lover (and sometimes his guests) every type of sex and physical and emotional violation using erotic methods. Debased willfully and progressively, she ends as a slave, nude but with scars and masked owl-like, only an O, a zero and object for use. Not so Ives’ heroine. Sarah Nealis gets her way at the start and is never above, while enacting the fictional and dramatic Vanda, questioning Thomas’ interpretation of the character. Scott Kerns seldom seems much of a match for her. Whose power is being manifest even in a rape scene is questionable.
As for plot resolution, Ives clues in his text a reference to a play to which his own presents a final reversal: The Bacchae. In that one, Dionysius won out over Penthius but as much against his mother by making her commit the most atrocious murder a mother can commit. Disguises figure in that play too. Dionysius wins, but Ives’ comparable character is the opposite of that male god.
I think Venus in Fur is shorter than the literature it references. But partly due to its many repetitions and reversals, it surely seems to take awfully l-o-n-g to settle a modern battle between the sexes. The cleverness of plot is interesting, but how compelling are those who people it? Will Thomas and Vanda live on like comparables in A Chorus Line?
