Venus in Fur
Reviewed by Steven Leigh Morris
Ophelia’s Jump
Through February 23
RECOMMENDED:
It’s partly by accident that Beatrice Casagran’s current staging of David Ives’s 2010 two-character, titillating comedy of sexual politics is so absorbing. (Casagran directs the play for Ophelia’s Jump, in Upland.)
The entire context of the play is a theater audition in a studio. Ophelia’s Jump has a theater that’s essentially a studio, modified from a commercial property, so set designers Casagran and Raymond Jones simply added a brick wall façade to the stage, and then threw in a few props called for by the script (coffee maker, ramshackle table and chairs, a rehearsal divan and a pipe down the middle of the stage) — accentuating already extant qualities of the space and thereby nudging the production toward something site specific. That’s not the accident part. That much is by design.
The accident occurred mid-run, when one of the two actors sprained her ankle so severely that she was unable to complete the run. Determined to keep the show performing, the theater scrambled to find a replacement. It found Angela Sauer, who had played the role two years prior for a different company. In the performance I saw, she had rehearsed only twice with this troupe.
There are several reasons why this production looks so seamless: First is the manic energy that comes from Sauer, reviving a role in public, years later and on such short notice. Then there’s the play’s context of an audition for a play-within-the-play. The auditioner-writer-director, Thomas Novachek (Rick Wessel), and the actress, Vanda Jordan (Sauer), read/rehearse the play-within-the-play (Novachek’s adaptation of an 1870 novel Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher Masoch, after whom the term “masochism” was named). The actors are each required by that circumstance to hold a script while performing. And that requirement gives Sauer yet another leg up.
Furthermore, the production team at Ophelia’s Jump leverages to its advantage what might otherwise have been the deficit of putting on a play in a unit of an industrial park. And it didn’t hurt that the performance I observed took place during a rainstorm — as does the play, rife with the mysteries of thunder and lightning.
South Coast Repertory produced the play in 2014 with local actors Jaimi Paige and Graham Hamilton. Despite fine performances by both, the premise of an after-hours audition in a slightly grungy rehearsal hall during a storm, being played out in Costa Mesa’s sumptuous Julianne Argyros Stage, was one-step removed — contrasted against the striking authenticity that Ophelia’s Jump brings to the play, by virtue of its space and even by the weather that night.
The play opens with the exhausted Novachek about to return to his fiancée after having auditioned what he regards as a hopeless parade of actresses to play a 19thcentury noblewoman for his stage adaptation of von Sacher Masoch’s erotic novel. In bursts Jordan, hours late, carting a massive sack as though she might be homeless, brash, cursing the subway. And so begins a sexual dance between the pair in which the “stupid” actress (as he calls her at one point) floats one yard above the seething, intellectual man. Neither is what they seem at first glance. Beneath his inquisitiveness about gender roles lies an entrenched misogyny, which she identifies in about five seconds.
Furthermore, she isn’t just mercurial, she is the embodiment of it. She refers to having “skimmed” the source material novel as well as his play (“S&M porn” is how she keeps describing it, to his consternation); she claims to know his playwrighting background, as though trying to impress, by citing a title he never wrote. Talk about S&M. When she undresses in order to avoid being thrown out, and to start reading for the audition (initially against his will), she reveals herself in 19th century lingerie and a dog collar. Now the guy can’t say no. He’s impressed that she went to the trouble of buying the collar for an audition. Oh, no, she fires back, “That’s left over from my days as a prostitute,” then she shrieks in laughter. Who is this woman? A hooker, a Greek goddess, or both?
And then comes a turning point. She dons an ornate gown for the noble character of Wanda in his play, a gown she brought for the audition in her sack. (She also bought an “authentic” frock coat for him to rehearse in — three bucks at a discount store.) She wriggles into the gown with a striking absence of grace. And then she recites the noblewoman’s lines. Not only does she float through the formal, quasi-poetical dialogue, she does so with a voice at least half an octave lower than how she was speaking a minute before. The crass woman who crashed through his door has disappeared, replaced by a mysterious entity from another century. This visceral transformation in voice, articulation and body language is all Sauer. Even her rabbit-eyes are impish one moment and regal the next, returning to impish on the turn of a dime. This is a performance of pristine dexterity.
Meanwhile, Wessel’s Novachek is a wonderful foil — soft-spoken, contrasted against her brashness; unwittingly pompous, contrasted against her earthiness.
Novachek purports to be curious, eager to explore, yet he recoils defensively at her suggestions — she posits that the masochist he’s playing is really just a double for himself. Also, he seems to believe that a man pleading with a woman to subjugate and humiliate him is a feminist act, empowering her — ergo politically he’s in the clear for adapting such a treatise and putting it on the stage. The woman he calls “stupid” is sharp enough to realize that he’ll eventually blame the woman for the very subjugation that he requested, that it’s all just porn.
The only question is, who holds the whip at any given moment?
Ophelia’s Jump Studio, 2009 Porterfield Way, Suite H, Upland; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 4 p.m.; through Saturday, Feb. 23; (909) 734-6565; opheliasjump.org. Running time 80 minutes with no intermission.
