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Shows Worth Seeing:
Venus in Fur
By David Ives
Samuel Friedman Theatre
261 W. 47th St.
Box office: (212) 239-6200
The prodigious buzz swirling around
Venus in Fur is mostly coming from over-the-top praise for
the actress Nina Arianda. Arianda is giving a splendid, physically
comic performance as Vanda, a young actress who arrives late for
an audition and then manipulates her way into not only being heard
but also strangely dominating Thomas, the author-director. It
ought to be said, though, that the play’s basic conception
is itself responsible for a lot of the fun. Venus in Fur
is a prolonged variation on the ever trusty casting-couch scene—you
know, pretty-girl climber does what’s necessary to grab
the next showbiz rung—delightfully twisted into a wonderfully
suspenseful pretzel. David Ives has arranged Vanda’s multifarious
gambits—she’s weepy one moment, then floozy-ignorant,
then cuttingly observant—with devious cleverness, so we’re
never quite sure what the game is, and neither is Thomas. Furthermore,
the play has a bombshell ending, which I cannot reveal, that is
the most profoundly theatrical climax for its setup I can imagine.
For all that, the text isn’t airtight: a few major transitions
feel unjustified and some gags are repetitious. Also, Hugh Dancy
is miscast as Thomas. He comes off as a weak-willed man prone
to masochism from the outset, whereas maximizing the psychological
comedy of this situation requires an arrogant, egotistical man
whose vulnerabilities have to be truly disclosed and extracted
by Vanda. It’s a testimony to the strength of both Arianda’s
performance and the dramatic conception that these drawbacks don’t
ruin the evening. Walter Bobbie's production is a big, fat, sexy
pleasure and even, in the end, something of a feminist provocation.
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Other Desert Cities
By Jon Robin Baitz
Booth Theatre
222 W. 45th St.
Box office: (800) 282-8495
If you share my view of Jon Robin Baitz
as a talented and ambitious playwright who too often gets trapped
by his own rhetoric, then Other Desert Cities will happily
surprise you. Unlike previous Baitz works like The Film Society
and Substance of Fire, this new play doesn’t feel
like a setup for a grandstanding climactic debate where everyone
is implausibly articulate and the antagonists feel more like debating
positions than people. Other Desert Cities is a refreshingly
messy family tale. It does have a climactic debate, but not one
with a neat conclusion, and it leaves a strong sense that the
story developed in ways that surprised the author. That’s
a promising genesis for any drama. The family’s parents,
played with dead-on bombast and bluster by Stacy Keach and Stockard
Channing, are Hollywood royalty turned right-wing muckamucks.
Having gathered their two grown children in Palm Springs for Christmas
one year—Trip and Brooke, played with appealing relish by
Thomas Sadoski and Rachel Griffith—they are forced to confront
a closeted old ghost when Brooke shows them the typescript of
a searing memoir she has written about her long dead brother.
So far, so trite. Family reunions spoiled by angry progeny are
as common as drunken Irishmen in the theater. And this family
argument takes on a worryingly familiar political cast as liberal
Brooke accuses Reaganite mom and dad of callous selfishness. Thankfully,
events take a sudden and utterly unpredictable turn here that,
among other important matters, completely reboots the family argument.
Identities are fundamentally questioned, fixed moral positions
are examined and overturned, and rather than resolving the many
loose moral threads, the play ends up tying them into fascinating
new knots. Joe Mantello’s production is perfectly calibrated
to set up both the big surprises and the crucial emotional steps
along the way to maximum effect, and in the end the evening grips
you in ways you could never have anticipated.
