Venus in Fur
by David Ives
Orlando Shakes • Orlando, Florida
directed by Monica Long Tamborello
featuring Walter Kmiec and Tracie Lang
by Carl F. Gauze
Orlando Shakes really pushes boundaries with this psychosexual drama.
Show producer Thomas (Kmiec) has one last actress to cross examine, and then he can go home to his safe and cozy wife. But as Thomas closes up, he is forced to interview the sexy and psychotic Vanda (Lang), an actress he wasn’t expecting on so many levels. Vanda is tall, good looking, and wound up like a cheap alarm clock after taking the subway all the way from uptown on a rainy night. She demands an audition, and by proxy the dissolution of Thomas’s self-image. His dinner will be very cold by the time he gets home, assuming he can go home.
It’s a photorealistic exploration of the power dynamics of sex, and it raises a question: is penetration the real goal here? Or is it simply the vehicle expressing who is the master, and who is the servant? The less clear that question is, the more powerful the climax, no matter who is top and who is bottom.
Kmiec oscillates between author and protagonist, while Lang does everything else: she attempts to seduce him with everything from cosplay, to lightweight BDSM, and finally, with German sexual guilt trips. Vanda is quite versatile. The power dynamic climaxes with Thomas’s forced abandonment of an unseen offstage wife. The brief phone message of “I won’t be home tonight” locks in his future, and we are left with the salacious question: “Who here is the dominator, and who is the sex slave?” More importantly, we see the merger of sex and control, and how that union blurs how we see our fellow humans. And I suspect this “play within a play” would have some pretty interesting rehearsals, ones I would pay to see, nevermind the actual production with real butts in seats.
