I originally wrote this review for an introductory theater class at UCCS in spring semester 2014.
Content note: kink
Venus in Fur was the only UCCS Theatreworks production this season that was performed at a location off-campus. The play, written by David Ives, deals with S&M themes, gender roles, and involves metatheater, but it’s only recommended for ages 16 and up due to adult content.
The venue for Venus in Fur used to be the Soho bar in downtown Colorado Springs, located at 527 South Tejon, which added essential context to the production, as you might imagine a BDSM dungeon to be located in an urban, grunge-style part of town. The show ran from March 20 to April 13. I attended the show on March 26.
When the play opened, with a clap of thunder and lightning flash, I was surprised, but I was not pulled into the action and world of the play right away. Although I have not seen many two-person plays, the interactions between Vanda (Carley Cornelius) and Thomas (Jon Barker) were well-executed. At first, Vanda’s apparently ditzy wannabe actress mentality was amusing. Thomas, the serious, academically-bent playwright, dismisses her attempt to audition for the part of the heroine / villainess, but then, impressed by her depth of research in the play and her period costume, he allows her to demonstrate how she would play Wanda von Dunayev in Thomas’s adaptation of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s novel “Venus in Furs,” published in 1870.
Carley Cornelius seemed completely like a stereotypical “valley girl,” overly concerned with fashion details and trendy slang, incredibly disorganized and shallow, despite good intentions throughout the first half hour to hour of the show. Jon Barker portrayed Thomas as an uptight, punctual man with a typical middle-class life engaged to someone in medical school. He tosses the pictures from all the other women who auditioned on the floor before Vanda arrived and stomps on them because none of them fit the part of Wanda as he sees her.
Watching Wanda’s confident flamboyance and Thomas’s discomfort as she changes costume and disrobes into a fishhook and leather dominatrix-style outfit was amusing and also an excellent use of foreshadowing.
As the plot progresses and Thomas visualizes Vanda playing Wanda, she convinces him to act out the role of the male love interest, Severin von Kushemski. Thomas knows that Kushemski in the novel has a desire to be beaten by Wanda because he was caned in his underwear by his aunt while lying on top of her fur coat as a pre-adolescent.
It is interesting to see the power dynamic between the characters shift as Wanda takes charge of the audition, moving around stage props and demonstrates a re-interpretation of the script, turning it into a cold-reading style dress rehearsal. The sense of metatheater becomes so intense that I started to feel like this was actually happening in front of me, as if I was looking in on an real studio after an afternoon of failed auditions.
Then Wanda begins to analyze and even criticize the gender roles in “Venus” with Thomas, who defends his script and the original novel as something historical and just a story he is interested in for solely academic reasons. Wanda confronts him, telling him she believes that he shares Kushemski’s desire for S&M. She intuitively probes at his lackluster romantic history, and tells him that Wanda’s role is written from a misogynistic point-of-view.
Suddenly, Wanda has the upper hand. As a dominatrix now, she convinces Thomas to call his fiancé and tell her that he is staying at the studio tonight, then she binds him to the metal support beam at stage left. Vanda transforms from a clueless wannabe actress through the character Wanda into an intimidating force of nature. I was almost intimidated by her command of both Thomas and the whole stage.
The last half hour of the production seemed much more realistic and intense than the first hour of the 90-minute show.
At the very end, Vanda leaves Thomas to contemplate his wrongs against women as she reveals herself to be the goddess Aphrodite, disappearing in a thunderclap. This ending was a total surprise for me — a plot twist I honestly did not anticipate. Having Wanda actually be an ancient Greek goddess in a modern-day story at first seemed slightly too much like unrealistic deux ex-machina, a overly convenient way to solve a plot difficulty, suddenly escalating the power struggle and hoisting Wanda’s character over the top by giving her deity status.
But Aphrodite did appear in the opening scenes of the novel and Thomas and Vanda both mentioned the goddess several times throughout their discussion of how to act out the script, so her appearance is foreshadowed. Although the goddess idea may seem somewhat hyperbolic and pushes the boundaries of what is realistic and believable, I think the twist ending actually works within the framework of Venus in Fur, but in other productions, a sudden appearance of Aphrodite at the end of a play would fall flat.
UCCS Theatreworks often holds a prologue lecture to give background information and context to their productions.
Venus in Fur‘s prologue was held on March 23rd at 2:30 p.m., on the set of the stage production in downtown Colorado Springs.
The prologue lecture was a conversation, interview style between Professor Kevin Landis and Mistress Djuna, a retired dominatrix. Overall, Mistress Djuna shattered every preconceived notion I had about BDSM and dominatrixes. She was dressed in black leather boots, but she was not very tall, and presented herself as mild-mannered, almost shy, and she was wearing a floral print dress.
Mistress Djuna’s perspective on BDSM as a sexual and emotional outlet and her personal motivations for participating in the world of kink also seemed unconvention and defied stereotypes.
She said her encounter with a stalker at age 28 toward the end of graduate school and her intense fears and paranoias from that experience made the idea of BDSM role play appealing to her, because she could explore power dynamics in a controlled way. When she began her career in BDSM as a submissive, she said she was seeking catharsis, which was something she said she offered to many of her clients later in her basement dungeon in Denver as a dominatrix. She also said she still seeks to help others, especially women, experience sexual healing and better self-image through Tantric energy work.
Mistress Djuna sais she believes that BDSM is a valid way to deal with primal fears and desires which may originate in childhood and fulfill needs that modern American society usually views as being deviant from sexual norms.
She also thinks the importance of this experience can stem from “being able to be alive and naked and vulnerable with another human being.”
The main impression I received from her talk was that she viewed herself as a sort of counselor who used both a written contract and her intuition to determine her clients’ needs and desires, or “what they needed to work through before taking their energy from them.”
She had to decide how to safely give them the experience that they wanted and build up to that. If the session included beating with a cane, she would have to built up to that level with leather whips or other instruments.
As a dominatrix, her job was to inspire fear in her client by stomping around behind the curtain and then bursting out, dressed in leather. Her client waited, kneeling on the floor in the nude. She recalled that one man in particular had beautiful blue eyes and long, feminine eyelashes. He looked up at her almost helplessly, waiting for whatever she might do. She knew what he desired, and she “grabbed his b**** and dragged him over to the cross” in her dungeon.
Professor Landis and Mistress Djuna also discussed the similarities between the role of a dominatrix in setting a scene, conjuring a particular mood for a client, and how a director, actors, and stage managers perform a theatrical production. She said that Venus in Fur was a solid story that realistically portrayed a sadomasochistic relationship.
Mistress Djuna set clear boundaries between herself and her clients within her written contract, and she said she also never had sexual intercourse with any of her clients.
She said aftercare was also important, as she helped her clients to come back down out of a flight-or-fight state during the scene and back to normal life. She would discuss the weather and other mundane topics with them, and usually sent them an email afterward to follow up. She said she had never been threatened by any of her clients, although some of them were less mentally stable than others, and others were males considerably larger and stronger than her.
Toward the end of her talk, she said that she wished BDSM was less stigmatized, because if people could find their needs met in a partner or someone else they knew, the need for dominatrixes-for-hire would be eliminated.
“I wish we could all meet these kinds of needs for each other,” she said.
The idea of a dominatrix being more like a coach or counselor was something I did not expect, even though I am familiar with the concepts behind BDSM.
Overall, the lecture changed my view of BDSM from being something tantalizing but dark and menacing to being an experience potentially as dark as your own personal fears, as dark as you wish it to be in order to face your particular demons or nightmares.
I had also never thought of the similarities of a BDSM experience to a theatrical production before, although it made sense that Mistress Djuna was more of a rehearsed character, a mask that the real woman behind it put on for the purpose of helping others. Also, the tools used in a scene — crosses, whips, restraints — being like stage props that are intended to produce an emotional and psychological experience was an interesting perspective on BDSM subculture.
Eleanor Skelton 