Lawrence Bommerâ€™s Stage and Cinema review of â€œVenus in Furâ€ by David Ives, directed by Joanie Schultz, at Goodman Theatre in Chicago.

FUR A GOOD TIME, CALL MASOCHISM ON PARADE

David Ives’ two-person fetish comedy, Venus in Fur, is a sexy crowd pleaser and an actors’ tour de force exercise. The play casts a spell of “delicious cruelty,” but beyond the sado-masochism that it both celebrates and exploits, it’s even more manipulative than it pretends to be. The joke, such as it is, is on the audience for succumbing’”if they do’”to its carnal charms. Caught you looking!

Salaciously directed by Joanie Schultz, Goodman Theatre’s current offering flagellates a supposedly jaded audience with a 50 Shades of Gray-style sexual competition: An initially magisterial Rufus Collins and a strident-to-sensuous Amanda Drinkall prove (as if we needed more) the danger of life imitating art. The occasion is an off-hours audition in an N.Y.C. studio. The partners are ambitious actress Vanda, hours late for a try-out that she’s not even scheduled for, and the initially bemused director Thomas, who is staging his adaptation of an 1869 novella, “Venus in Fur” by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch–as in “masochism.”

Dressed provocatively as a dominatrix with kinky boots, leather lingerie and a dog collar, attractive voluptuary Vanda is ripe to read for the title role. She’s conveniently learned most of her lines and, of course, the all-important action. Fascinated by her commitment to the part (among other things), Thomas consents to read the dialogue of a count who finds himself seduced by a modern Aphrodite, wearing pelts and ready to turn any prop into a sex toy.

What follows is a 95-minute cage-match of corruption: Wanda slowly morphs into the Sacher-Masoch’s vixenish top girl and Thomas is wimpishly reduced to her whipping boy. Wanda finds out just enough about Thomas’ real life to turn it into more libidinous grist for her S & M mill. (She has, it seems, a mysterious connection to Thomas’ unseen insecure fiancée.) As a storm rages symbolically above them, the thespian aggressor and her broken master indulge in topsy-turvy game-playing, role-switching shenanigans where the only bond is bondage itself.

All along, it seems Wanda has a very different agenda in mind from the one she has in body–one more rooted in revenge than romance. But will the presumably superior man be vanquished by fur and flesh? Of course, there’s no denying the sexist subtext of the show: Drinkall exposes all and Collins takes off nothing. If there’s any chemistry between them, it’s whatever the observer brings to or projects onto this simulated eroticism.

Perversely enough, the most disturbing truth in Venus in Furs isn’t the insistent voyeurism that reduces the sniggling audience to peeping Toms, the rhapsodized friction of mink stoles on human flesh, or the Liaisons Dangereuses–style treachery. No, these are basically “one trick ponies” delivering familiar goods. Ives wants to have it both ways: The Goodman theatergoers must be both aroused and upbraided. We’re meant to be drawn into this highly heterosexual, fetishistic fantasy, then metaphorically scourged for having ignored its misogynistic fundamentals. Gotcha!