STEAMY-BRILLIANT "VENUS IN FUR"

By Chuck Graham, TucsonStage.com

 

Thomas (Michael Tisdale) isn't Prince Charming, and Vanda (Gillian Williams) is a long way from Cinderella.

 

There’s no denying the appeal of someone who is both brainy and naughty at the same time. The same goes for plays, particularly Arizona Theatre Company’s steamy-brilliant “Venus in Fur,” written by the ever-daring David Ives and directed by Shana Cooper.

In the play’s dramatized gender war of traditional male power versus emerging female power, sex itself is the desired weapon of mass destruction. On the surface Gillian Williams as Vanda and Michael Tisdale as Thomas are having the time of their lives getting laughs from situations flaunting the quaint perversity of 1880s immorality.

Thanks to the magic of modern internet pornography these days, the humor of playing stylized sex roles involving dog collars and thigh-high boots is quite accessible.

But under the writhing surface of “Venus in Fur,” filled with provocative body language that would have been quickly censored in earlier centuries, Ives has devised a haunting examination of sexual roles, gender identity, and the attraction of power.

It is the power part that has become so politicized by modern feminist propaganda. To which Ives has added the lemon twist of making Thomas a playwright/director consumed by the need to be a slave to Vanda’s Victorian-style dominatrix. He wants her to be on top, in every sense of the word.

So does Vanda have real power over this man? Or not?

The set-up begins in a tawdry New York loft space designed by Sibyl Wikersheimer, where harassed and exhausted Thomas (being a one-man theater company) has spent all day auditioning 35 failed females for the role of Vanda, powerful seductress in the 1870 book by Austrian novelist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Yep, it is his name and this book which has given us the word masochism.

Wanda the Big Apple actress is a buzz bomb of energy and excuses who bursts in on Thomas, demanding to be auditioned. Though he has all the power and she has none, he’s helpless to get her out of the room. So they start to read the script Thomas has adapted from Sacher-Masoch.

Instantly Wanda becomes the literary WANDA, the regal Euopean woman prepared to satisfy her demanding lover Leopold – the part Thomas is reading. For the final 75 minutes of this 100-minute maelstrom performed without intermission, power is electrified to white-hot intensity as first one actor than the other squeezes down hard trying to keep the upper hand.

By the end of this hard wired production, pressure-packed with sexual intimidation, both sides have done some heavy damage to the other’s ego and id. But is it convincing enough to decide who wins the gender war, once and for all?

Maybe not, but it is a start.

“Venus in Fur” runs through April 26, with performances at various times Tuesdays through Sundays in the Temple of Music and Art, 330 S. Scott Ave. Tickets start at $37, with discounts available for seniors and military; $10 for students at all performances; rush tickets half-price for balcony seating. For details and reservations, 520-622-2823, or visit www.arizonatheatre.org