It's hard to imagine that playwright David Ives' first draft of Venus in Fur was a straightforward adaption of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's 1870 novella of almost the same name. (Sacher-Masoch had his Venus in "furs.") What gives Ives' recent Broadway play its impact, relevance, and a good deal of humor is the framing device that interprets the original material in the context of an audition for a fictional play that sounds a lot like what Ives originally set out to write. Perhaps Ives' adaption would have been considerably different, but what we hear of the make-believe adaptation sounds like a stately bore that nevertheless works in its adopted context. Venus in Fur, now at ACT, is anything but a bore.
Sacher-Masoch's name lives on most profoundly in the term "masochism," which was introduced by psychiatrist Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing while Sacher-Masoch was still alive. But fictional playwright-director Thomas Novachek insists he has no intimate interest in the subject, that he just thinks Sacher-Masoch wrote a compelling story worthy of a stage adaptation. It doesn't take a dramaturgical sleuth to presume that these protestations will ring hollow before too long.
Alone onstage when the play begins in an empty audition studio, chatting amiably with his fiancee on the phone, Thomas certainly seems coated in vanilla. The auditions are done for the day, a central role is still uncast, and he is wearily preparing to leave when two bursts of lightning throw him off stride. The first is of the thunderstorm variety, briefly flickering the lights, and the second arrives bursting through the door burdened with tote bags, a crippled umbrella, and a manic manner that taxes the playwright's default state of civility.
It's an actress woefully late for the auditions, her name somehow even missing from the appointment schedule, and whom you recognize as a passive-aggressive loser whose life will always be a shambles. "I'm usually demure and shit," says Vanda Jordan, who apparently knows little about the play and less about the theatre (her resume includes Hedda Gobbler ). But she wheedles Thomas into letting her read, she for the part of Wanda von Dunayev and he taking on the role of Severin von Kushemski �" characters that mirrored Sacher-Masoch's own efforts at convincing a woman to force him to be her slave.
Brenda Meaney is quite wonderful as Vanda, convincingly playing a woman whose quirks are funny onstage but, in life, would drive most of us to drink, if not to the nearest exit. But then Meaney's Vanda astonishingly transforms herself into the regal character of the play, and Thomas, who has been woodenly delivering Severin's lines, begins to invest himself emotionally to a point of no return. As Thomas, Henry Clarke is starchily convivial at the start before the veneer is peeled to reveal a frightened, excited, and increasingly helpless interior.
Working on John Lee Beatty's original Broadway set, director Casey Stangl brings the play and its characters confidently to life. The word "ambiguity" is used a lot in the 95-minute play, and boundaries between reality and the magical increasingly blur. The mythological hocus-pocus that ends the play feels false, but it is easy enough to subjugate yourself to the rest of Venus in Fur.
Venus in Fur will run at ACT through April 13. Tickets are $20-$120. Call 749-2228 or go to www.act-sf.org.