The masochist believes in the transformative power of magic, of the variety that the goddess Circe used to turn Odysseus’ men into swine. To the masochist, the beloved is a goddess (Venus, perhaps), who, in Her infinite power, squeezes everything out of him which is not consumed with her. He loses all free will, and is her slave. He loves the feel of the whip on his back, the taste of her boot, because it shows how absolute his subjugation is. His pain is pleasure; his humiliation is exaltation.
Let us step back. This is a difference in degree, not kind, from the rest of us. What is the idealization of romance for us? That Cupid — son of Venus — shoots us with his magic arrows, which makes us fall in love with the person next to us. A goofy grin takes over our faces; our hearts goes thumpa-thumpa-thumpa, Tex Avery style, and we float, with little hearts circling our heads, staring into the face of the beloved. We are prisoners of passion and limerence. We miss our appointments; we forget the Rule Against Perpetuities; our friends and families becomes irrelevant to us because the mind and imagination are full of the beloved.
Let us step back, again, into ordinary life. In it, this woman goes with her beloved to the opera, although she can’t stand opera and would much rather be watching the Redskins on TV over a couple of beers. This man buys a new car for his beloved’s son, much against his better judgment. This woman works fourteen hours a day at two jobs so that her beloved can go to grad school, though she suspects that his degree will not provide income for them. But wait, you say, these are the sacrifices we all make for love; nothing here is exotic. Exactly so. But what is more exotic, more exacting, more powerful — that someone kiss a boot for five minutes for his beloved, or that someone works fourteen hours a day for four years for hers?
All right. Let us consider the relationship between the actor and the director, “Actors are cattle,” Alfred Hitchcock is reputed to have said. I think he meant it, in the same way that Circe meant it when she said “men are pigs”. The actor knows her lines, understands her character, apprehends the relationship between her character and the other characters on stage, but the director understands everything — the purpose of all the action; the sense of the play; the relationship of sound and lighting cues to the characters’ emotional landscape — and so is godlike. “God has a plan for us,” says the religious man, having just lost his wife to cancer. “The director knows what he’s doing,” mutters the actor, after having received a bewildering note from the Big Cheese.
It is a dark and stormy night. Thomas Novachek (Scott Ward Abernethy), playwright and (first-time) director, has written an adaptation of Venus in Furs, Leopold von Sacher-Mosach’s seminal novel about masochism. He is casting, and having a hard time of it. All of the women he has auditioned for the role of Vanda von Dunajew, the goddess who seduces and enslaves the protagonist, are busts — addle-pated, whiny, self-involved children who could no more represent Vanda’s chilled sophistication than they could pose as rocket scientists, or giraffes. He explains all this over the phone to his fiancée, salting his recitation of woes with complaints about the culture in general, including the immaturity of actors and their stupidity; mocking their voices; giving them cartoon dialogue. Suddenly a huge bolt of lightning and crash of thunder disconnects his phone, and moments later Vanda Jordan (Anna DiGiovanni) bursts into the audition room.
She is, of course, the personification of the others Thomas derided in his conversation with his fiancée. Worse, she is a mess: her slender resume on crumpled paper; her headshot looking like a prison mug shot; dressed like a hooker who specializes in s&m. Her Brooklyn accent is hopelessly broad. She praises Thomas for a play he didn’t write. Plus, she is several hours late. No — worse, she didn’t have an appointment at all.
He is, shall we say, short with her. Fatigued by his fruitless day, hungry and eager to be home with his fiancée, he makes some vague promise of future auditions and points her to the open door. Dejected and frustrated, she almost walks back out — until she gets to the door, closes it, turns around and says coolly, “That’s not going to happen,” she says.
You’ve probably guessed that her audition is brilliant — that, reading the two-hander with Thomas playing Socher-Masoch’s protagonist, Severin von Kusiemski, Vanda nails her character’s boldness, sensuality, and sense of control. Perhaps less expectedly, Thomas — who is not an actor — immediately summons Severin. Thomas’ script is not subtle; Severin, seeing Madame von Dunajew’s possibility as his long-awaited dominatrix, falls like a ton of bricks. He begs her to take control of his body and soul and she, slowly and with seeming reluctance, agrees.
Thomas and Vanda read through Thomas’ steamy script together, Vanda as the goddess, Thomas playing the part of the subjugated subject, and then they step back into real life. Vanda drops her austere haughtiness and becomes the earthy Brooklyn woman she was when she walked into the rehearsal; Thomas, too, ceases to be the dissolute aristocrat Sacher-Mocher invented and becomes the abstract, slightly pedantic creature playwright David Ives invented. Ives mines these scenes for laughs — the contrast between Thomas and Vanda delivering the heightened language of Novachek’s play and back in the audition room, as themselves, is natural comedy — but these are at bottom serious moments, and the transformation which drives the play is rooted in them.
“You’re the director,” Vanda tells him, “you’re supposed to torture us.” But not exactly. In The Story of O, a submissive woman makes her lover so dependent on her obedience for his pleasure that step by step, she takes control of the relationship. Here, too, Vanda takes control, changing the blocking here, improvising a new opening there. Occasionally, she lets Thomas win, as when she agrees to deliver a line standing behind him, instead of from across the room. Thomas’ gratification is obvious, and so is hers — she knows she has him hooked.
You can guess how this turns out; better yet, go see it. The casting, and director Stevie Zimmerman’s choices, make this play’s unusual developments seem natural, even inevitable. Abernethy gives us a young Thomas, which makes us think of the tyro, not entirely sure of himself. His fiancée, we learn, is wealthy and the audition room seems off-off-off Broadway (Nathaniel Sharer and Jordan Friend dress the set nicely); he is a playwright, to be sure, but it’s not given that he is a successful one, or even that he will be a playwright much longer. DiGiovanni’s Vanda, on the other hand, takes charge the moment she slams into the audition room, though she is wet and bedraggled. I have seen the role played whiny in this moment, with Vanda helpless and pathetic, but the most striking thing about DiGiovanni’s Vanda at the outset (aside from the impressive stream of profanity that comes out of her mouth) is that she addresses God as an equal, and as someone who failed to perform on His contract. Thomas is in charge at the outset, but it is obvious that this will change, even to someone who didn’t read a review and wasn’t familiar with the genre.
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4615 Theatre Company enhances the effect by staging the play in its tiny rehearsal room, for which there are twenty-five seats. This does not, as you might have expected, make the play sexier or more dramatic. It makes it more real. It is as though you were sitting, unnoticed, in the room, waiting for a chance to audition for Vanda or Severin, while this director and this actor have their passion play. Director Zimmerman’s surefootedness, and that of these two good actors, makes it all the more authentic. When they roar at each other — and they do, frequently — it is the roar of lions. When they coo to each other, it will be impossible to know for certain whether Thomas and Vanda are in character, or being themselves. Vanda ultimately knows so much that you may wonder if her powers are otherworldly. Ives leaves the matter ambiguous — or “ambivalent”, as Vanda repeatedly says.
There is a political theme to Thomas’ undoing — one more overt today than it was in 2010 when Venus in Fur debuted. But the most damning accusation against Thomas — the one that costs him his power — is that the work he has adapted is trash; “s and m porno,” as Vanda puts it. To Ives, a frequent and successful adapter of old texts (The School for Lies, The Liar, The Heir Apparent, A Flea in Her Ear, even White Christmas), this must be the most disabling insult of all.
Venus in Fur is a Rubik’s Cube of love, lust and power, and the lust for power and the power of love, and 4615 does it full justice.
Venus in Fur by David Ives, directed by Stevie Zimmerman . Featuring Scott Ward Abernethy and Anna DiGiovanni . Costume design by Noelle Cremer . Lighting design by Katie McCreary . Sound design by Jordan Friend . Scenic design by Friend and Nathaniel Sharer . Emily Sucher is the intimacy coordinator. Abi Rowe is the stage manager . Produced by 4615 Theatre Company . Reviewed by Tim Treanor.
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