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by David Ives, directed by Jennifer Tarver

Canadian Stage, Bluma Appel Theatre, Toronto

October 3-27, 2013;

Berkeley Street Theatre Downstairs, Toronto

December 13-29, 2013;

December 18-28, 2014

Thomas: “We are explicable, but not inextricable”

   

David Ives’s Venus in Fur of 2010 is play so artificial and so superficial that it’s amazing it has garnered so much praise as an “intellectual thriller”.  It’s not so intellectual that Ives forgets to provide explanations of every word or concept that his target middle-brow audience might not know.  And it’s definitely not thrilling.  The plot arc is obvious after the first 20 of its 90-minute running time.  The only surprise is the surreal ending that has the negative effect of turning play that might have explored the sexual power games that men and women play into simplistic revenge fantasy against male chauvinism.

Thomas Novachek (Rick Miller) has been auditioning young women all day to play the lead role in his play Venus in Fur, but has found no one suitable and wonders whether any women today have the intellect or passion needed to play the role he has written.  His play is a stage adaptation of the 1870 novella Venus im Pelz, mistranslated in English as Venus in Furs) by Leopold Sacher-Masoch (1836-95), an Austria writer born in what is now Ukraine.  The fact that Sacher-Masoch was in real life a dévoté of the sexual humiliation he describes in Venus im Pelz caused psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing to coin the term “masochism” after him in 1886.

Thomas Novachek’s Venus in Fur follows Sacher-Masoch’s book closely, so closely in fact that one wonders how it would ever work on stage.  In it the aristocrat Severin von Kusiemski falls in love with Wanda von Dunajew and asks to be her slave and to have her treat him in various degrading ways, such as acting as her personal servant and wearing servant’s livery.  This scheme goes well, although Wanda’s view of Severin diminishes with each further humiliation Severin endures, until she meets a Greek count, to whom she herself would like to submit.

Just as Thomas is about to go home after his fruitless auditions, a young actress named Vanda Jordan (Carly Street) turns up.  Thomas tries to send her away, but, in an unconvincing transition, allows to audition once he sees her in the antique dress she has brought along.  When she reads the part of Wanda, her clumsy behaviour and scatterbrained mentality fall away along with her “Noo Yawk” accent.  Instead, she is sudden all poise, focus and eloquent with a mid-Atlantic accent and, seemingly, a deep understanding of the text. 

Thomas is as amazed as we are in this transformation of Vanda into Wanda.  Yet, anyone who knows about acting should realize that actors can only communicate a text fully if they fully understand it.  Realistically, Thomas waits far too long to wonder how a woman who just earlier referred to 1870 as “medieval times” and never heard of “Austria-Hungary”, can so easily embody the manners of that time and place.  The artificiality of Ives’s play becomes obvious when every time Thomas catches Vanda out in a lie, he doesn’t pursue it and end their session.  We are meant to believe that Thomas gets so caught up in acting out the words he wrote that he doesn’t notice that his “audition” of Vanda has suddenly become a pointless read-through of his text.  Even frequent phone calls from his fiancé at home can’t seem to break Thomas’s hardly credible compulsion to keeping reading his text with Vanda.

What is supposed to make the continued reading credible is that Thomas is as sexually fascinated with Vanda as Severin, the character he reads, is with Wanda.  This might seem intriguing if one had never seen Strindberg’s Miss Julie (1888) or Pirandello’s Enrico IV (1921) or Genet’s The Maids (1947) or that all deal with questions of role-playing and role-reversal and the subsuming of identity in the process of acting.  All three explore the topic more deeply and with greater impact than Ives’s play that has to keep inventing excuses for the action to continue. 

Readers of E.L. James’s Fifty Shades trilogy will be titillated by the aspects of BDSM in the play, but anyone who recently saw Tim Luscombe’s play PIG at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, will be annoyed at how superficially Ives treats the subject.  Luscombe’s play about extremes forms of BDSM among homosexuals was authentically disturbing because it managed to make the audience understand the mindset of a BDSM practitioner.  Ives, however, repeatedly uses an old trick familiar in Broadway plays of breaking the tension he creates with a joke just so the audience won’t have to get too involved in the subject matter.  Here the joke is always the same – just when scenes between Wanda and Severin start to become intense, Wanda shifts back to the ditzy Vanda to break the illusion. 

Both Rick Miller and Carly Street do as much as they can with their roles.  Given the similar backgrounds of Severin and Wanda, it’s unclear why she should have a mid-Atlantic accent and he should have a German accent.  Why, too, does Vanda play Venus with a German accent rather than an Italian one, especially since her Venus derives from a specific painting by Titian, Venus with a Mirror (1555)?  These questions aside, both Miller and Street are excellent at switching between accents so that we are never in doubt when they are acting or not acting.  This very lack of doubt, however, does make it more difficult for them to show when the two become so caught up in their characters they depart from the script.  They actually have to toss the physical script away to underscore the point for us. 

Street’s instantaneous transformation from Vanda to Wanda is startling and she ably distinguishes both from Venus.  Miller, a master of accents, chooses a rather comical German accent for Severin that did not seem appropriate.  When Miller as Severin and Vanda as Wanda read their lines in these accents Ives’s purple prose comes off like a SCTV parody of Masterpiece Theatre, which, unfortunately, we are meant to take seriously.  Severin’s saying, “We are explicable, but not inextricable” is just one of the faux-profundities peppered through Thomas’s script.  In what way are people every fully “explicable” – except, perhaps, in a superficial play?

There is no doubt that Venus in Fur is popular.  It is, in fact, most-produced play scheduled for the 2013-14 season in the US.  It gives audiences the illusion of exploring BDSM while never forcing them to ask questions of themselves.  It mechanically acts out the theme of the merging of actor and role that Pirandello’s works already exhaustively examined and treats us to a role-reversals within a hierarchy that are less compelling that those in plays by Strindberg or Genet.  Miller and Street’s performances are enjoyable, especially when the play does not try to be serious, and they make a dynamic team.  You only wish that they were in a play that demanded more of them since they have so much more to give.         

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Rick Miller and Carly Street. ©2013 David Hou.

For tickets, visit www.canadianstage.com.