BDSM RTV MEDIA NEWS!!!!



30 jan 2010



'Venus,' if you will -- for its smarts



Source: www.nypost.com  - New York Post - USA


If there's one complaint that doesn't come up often at the theater, it's that a play is too smart.


David Ives' new "Venus in Fur" stands out in several ways, and one of them is that it's packed with layers and ideas. So packed, in fact, that by the end it's bursting at the seams. It's exciting, but a challenge: Only masterful actors at the top of their game could keep it all together -- and the ones here struggle to keep up.

Ives is great at working from pre-existing material (he's spruced up the books for 28 Encores! musicals). Here, he borrowed the title, theme and some plot elements from Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's 1870 book "Venus in Furs."

In this two-hander, directed with skillful velocity by Walter Bobbie, Thomas (Wes Bentley) is an author and director casting his own stage adaptation, titled "Venus in Fur." He agrees to let Vanda (Nina Arianda) read, even though she showed up late and it's a stretch to picture this profanity-spewing, blissfully ditzy ("The Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Remind me . . . ?") specimen of modern blondeness as an elegant 19th-century dominatrix.

If Sacher-Masoch's name sounds familiar, it's because his own proclivities led to the coinage of the term "masochism." And Ives smartly integrates S&M's role-playing and ritualized power plays in his hall of mirrors, both to depict Vanda and Thomas' ever-evolving relationship and to underline the perverse nature of theater-making.

As Vanda drags Thomas deeper and deeper into his own text, she reveals more about herself, with the paradoxical result of appearing increasingly mysterious.

A potential clue comes when she points out that Thomas' adaptation skipped the novel's opening scene, in which the male lead meets the goddess Venus come to life. Suddenly a possibly supernatural interpretation opens up, but by then Ives has difficulty keeping all his balls in the air.

A more experienced cast may have helped, but Arianda and Bentley aren't ready to handle the hairpin turns their multifaceted characters must negotiate. Her entrance is a triumph of comic timing, for instance, but she's unconvincing as a steely seductress, while he strains to suggest Thomas' sexual epiphany. Alas, they still have a few kinks to work out.
elisabeth.vincentelli @nypost.com.