Shaker Bridge Theatre: Venus In Fur

Just closed Venus today - I'm really going to miss it almost as much as I'll miss working/playing with Lucas and Laura.

Here's the review:

With ‘Venus in Fur,’ Shaker Bridge Plumbs Desire and Power

By Nicola Smith

Valley News Staff Writer

Thursday, February 12, 2015

(Published in print: Thursday, February 12, 2015)

Venus in Fur, the tantalizing, entertaining play-within-a-play by David Ives now at Shaker Bridge Theater in Enfield, is one sure way to shake off the winter blues.

To say it’s a play about sex, power and domination makes it sound more heavy-going than it is. It begins as a screwball comedy — a tightly-wound, buttoned-down man meets a free-spirited blonde bombshell — but the stakes, and the tension, ratchet up as Ives introduces layers of complication and provocation.

Venus in Fur is an intimate conversation between two characters, two actors, but it’s also a play about the dichotomy between the way we present ourselves publicly and privately. And it’s about the deep-down needs, which aren’t always necessarily sexual and not always articulated, that we may not acknowledge to ourselves, but which other people can see in us.

Ives based his play on the erotic novella Venus in Furs, published in 1870 by the writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, who put the “masoch” in “masochism,” and whose name sounds like something dreamed up by Mel Brooks.

Sacher-Masoch was born in the Austro-Hungarian empire in the city of Lemberg, now Lviv in the Ukraine. His novella follows the amorous exploits of dreamy, sensitive intellectual Severin von Kusiemski, who becomes enamoured of Wanda (pronounced Vanda) von Dunajew, a woman of great intelligence and beauty. As they become involved, Kusiemski begs her to enslave him, which she happily does. He derives sexual pleasure from her dominance, but also feels the sting of her cruel indifference to him. The more submissive he is, the harsher her treatment, and the more exquisite his agony.

Ives’ play begins in a shabby New York audition room . Thomas, a writer and director who’s adapted Venus in Furs for the stage (Ives drops the last “s” in his title), complains on his cellphone to his fiancée that his efforts to find the right woman to play Vanda have been unsuccessful; the only actresses who have read for him, he says, are dim-witted and unprepared, with Valley Girl vocal mannerisms — and vulgar, to boot.

Thomas, played by a fine Lucas Van Engen, is the kind of New York intellectual who plays as a series of clichés: high brow, pompous and condescending. Beneath that, though, is an earnest idealist, and a man perhaps stifled by the very intellectual constructs to which he pays homage.

Just as Thomas has given up auditioning for the day, there’s a knock on the door. Enter real-life actress Vanda, played by a charismatic Laura Woyasz, swearing and talking a mile a minute, dragging in shopping bags and an umbrella. Flustered because she’s late for the audition, Vanda begs a reluctant Thomas to let her have a shot at a reading. Ives has fun introducing dramatic moments, such as Vanda’s entrance, with claps of thunder, as if we were watching a campy melodrama.

Thomas is tired and frustrated, and wants only to go home. He tells Vanda that he’s finished auditioning. In truth, she seems no different from the women he’s already sent on their way — clueless, and lacking an artistic aesthetic.

But Vanda is undaunted by his dismissiveness, and insists on reading for him. Isn’t it fate, after all, that she happens to have the same name as Sacher-Masoch’s heroine? And look! When she whips off her trenchcoat, she’s already dressed for the part, in black corset, garter belt and boots.

The moment Vanda starts reading her lines, Thomas is startled by her transformation into a poised, steely European aristocrat. And as Thomas and Vanda act out his play, with Vanda coaxing and flattering him into playing Severin (not much persuasion is needed) the balance of power shifts.

Vanda, who has been comically self-deprecating and charmingly flirtatious, begins to exert intellectual independence, poking fun at Thomas’ reverence for Sacher-Masoch’s prose, which, if you take a spin through the novella, has moments of acute insight into sexuality, but which also can read as if Anais Nin were being parodied by P.G. Wodehouse.

Ives takes this trope of the man at the mercy of a cruel woman and reimagines it. He respects the original, with its lengthy considerations of the nature of desire, but takes it further by examining the dynamics of power in more modern ways: The power of a director over an actor, the seduction of director by actor, the power of lust and imagination.

“You don’t have to tell me about sadomasochism; I’m in the theater!” Vanda jokes with Thomas, which gets a big laugh.

Isn’t Venus in Furs really just a hackneyed view of women, Vanda demands of Thomas. To cite one gem from the novella: “Despite all the progress of civilization, women have remained exactly as they emerged from the hand of Nature.”

Thomas protests but Vanda begins to, metaphorically, undress Thomas, probing his weaknesses and responding with increasing fury when she feels he’s dissembling.

Thomas realizes that this Vanda isn’t the same woman who walked in the door. But who is she exactly? How does Vanda understand the play so well, if she’s as untutored as she claimed to be? Why does she seem to know so much about Thomas’s fiancee Stacy, pegging her, accurately, as the same kind of uptight intellectual he is? Is Vanda’s intention to seduce or punish Thomas?

As the atmosphere intensifies, Vanda commands Thomas to dress her, just as Wanda commands Severin. The air is taut with erotic tension, of gratification delayed.

Bill Coons, the artistic director of Shaker Bridge Theater, has done a fine job with the actors playing Vanda and Thomas, balancing sensuality with laughter, and vulnerability with control.

Woyasz bursts on stage with the physical comedy of a Judy Holliday or a Goldie Hawn, exuding ditziness and likeability. She’s dynamic on stage, deft at comedy and commanding in the moments that call for a volatile toughness.

As Thomas, Van Engen strikes the right notes of the aspiring artist who wants to be taken seriously, but is also afraid that his life, when the facade has been dismantled, is something of a fraud.

The play ends on an ambiguous note (another point of comedy in the play: the distinction between “ambiguous” and “ambivalent”), with Thomas poised on the precipice of ... what exactly? Revelation or destruction? We’re not sure. The ending is a bit of a let-down after the rapid verbal volleys that have preceded it, but the playful comedy throughout more than compensates.

Venus in Fur continues at Shaker Bridge Theatre in Enfield’s Whitney Hall through Feb. 22. Tickets are $32, $25 for students with ID. For information and tickets call 603-448-3750 or go to shakerbridgetheatre.org.

Nicola Smith can be reached at nsmith@vnews.com.

And here are some photos from the production: