An Actress, a Director and a Power Struggle

 

By MICHAEL SOMMERS

“Venus in Fur” is a smart, seriously sexy comedy by David Ives that has steamed up three successive New York playhouses in recent seasons. The George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick, where the play is currently onstage, is among the dozen regional companies that have put it on their 2013 schedules, with good reason.

The playwright’s serio-comic depiction of an increasingly heated encounter between a theater director and an unknown actress in a rehearsal hall delves into aspects of power, both sexual and psychological, even as it touches on issues of personal identity, literary theory, feminism and mythology.

Don’t let all that scare you. “Venus in Fur” is a provocatively funny play that begins on a light note, as Thomas, an earnest writer-director, prepares to leave the shabby studio where he has been auditioning actresses for his stage adaptation of “Venus in Fur,” without success. Arriving unexpectedly out of a thunderstorm is Vanda, a brash nobody who claims she has an appointment to read for the leading role.

Although the cheerfully crass Vanda appears wildly unsuited for the part of a 19th-century aristocrat, she persuades a reluctant Thomas to hear her out. Script in hand, Vanda instantly sheds her brassy manners and magically assumes the cultivated tones and regal bearing of all the Barrymores rolled into one.

As the actress and the director talk about the text and begin to act it out, the audience learns the essentials of “Venus in Fur,” Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s scandalous 1870 novel about a European patrician who willingly becomes the slave of an imperious beauty.

“Basically, it’s S-and-M porn,” says Vanda, while Thomas claims it is serious literature.

When Vanda and Thomas get deeper into the story’s exotic and erotic role playing — the actress has brought thrift shop clothes for them to dress up in — it becomes apparent that Vanda is taking control of the intimate situation and Thomas is increasingly unable to resist her will.

By the time the 90-minute play is over, some may suspect that Vanda is literally not of this world. Others may believe she is simply an extremely manipulative individual. Whichever, it is fun to observe Vanda evolve from a dizzy thespian into a dominating personality. It is also a pleasure to laugh at Mr. Ives’s dialogue and then be compelled by the couple’s fervid power struggles upon a ratty chaise longue.

The admirable George Street production, which will travel to the Philadelphia Theater Company this month, is directed by Kip Fagan, who recently staged the Off Broadway play “The Revisionist,” with Vanessa Redgrave and Jesse Eisenberg.

Perhaps working with Ms. Redgrave helped Mr. Fagan to infuse his leading lady here, Jenni Putney, with the surprising refinement that transforms Vanda whenever she enacts the play within the play. Ms. Putney believably achieves Vanda’s initial shift into a higher gear, and from that point on her performance subtly grows in authority.

Mark Alhadeff, who portrays Thomas, was an understudy in the role in the Broadway production, and he ably traces his character’s double spiral into delicious subjugation. The statuesque Ms. Putney, often clad in little more than a black bustier, a brief leather skirt and steep heels as Vanda, displays a smoldering rapport with Mr. Alhadeff’s shorter, rather scruffy Thomas.

Mr. Fagan paces the comedy briskly for the most part, but slows down the tempo when Vanda and Thomas face off for the play’s final interludes. The setting for the grubby rehearsal hall, designed by Jason Simms, is a lofty space with brick walls, wood planking and a battered tin ceiling that becomes darkly intimate through Thom Weaver’s lighting. In such persuasive circumstances, “Venus in Fur” proves a seductive entertainment for sophisticated adults.

“Venus in Fur,” by David Ives, is at the George Street Playhouse, 9 Livingston Avenue, New Brunswick, through May 18. Information: (732) 246-7717 or gsponline.org.

photo by T. Charles Erickson