Mr. Ives’s play takes place in a generic room flooded with cruel fluorescent lighting. Thomas (Wes Bentley), a playwright and director who has been holding auditions for the female lead in his new play, is packing up his gear and ripping into the inadequacies of actresses when a latecomer blows in, splattering the room with excuses like a dog shaking off the rain.
Thomas tells her she has missed her chance, and notes that her name isn’t on the audition list anyway. But Vanda (Nina Arianda) churns through a series of pleas and protestations — now she’s the endearing kook, now the sad waif, now the stoic loser — and ultimately succeeds in battering the wary Thomas into submission. This posture, it turns out, is highly appropriate. For Thomas’s play is an adaptation of the 1870 novel “Venus in Fur” by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, about an idle aristocrat who draws the woman he is obsessed with into a sexual and emotional relationship in which she wields total power over him.
“Basically it’s S&M porn,” Vanda says as they prepare to read, a description that sets Thomas seething. “ ‘Venus in Fur’ is a serious novel,” he replies coldly. “It’s a great love story.”
Shrugging, Vanda plows through the mess of bags she has brought with her to find a flowing dress that she puts over the leather-and-chains gear she wore under the raincoat. “Anyway,” she says, “you don’t have to tell me about sadomasochism. I’m in the theater.”
Mr. Ives’s play, directed with laser-sharp precision by Walter Bobbie, operates on one level as a revenge comedy about the power dynamics in the audition room. Vanda’s daffy, needy-actress routine evaporates with a speed that unsettles Thomas as soon as she steps into the role of Dunayev, the woman in the play. Suddenly Vanda is the one in command of Thomas, through the force of her grasp on the artificial world they create.
The fake-English accent is impeccable, the gracious, high-born manners firmly in place. Curiously, Vanda seems to know the role virtually by heart, although she claimed earlier to have merely glanced through the script on the subway. Assuming the role of the besotted admirer begging to be subservient, Thomas surprises them both with his persuasive reading of a role he insists — no, really! — has nothing to do with his own predilections.
Ms. Arianda is sensational as the slippery, multilayered Vanda. She has a great gift for offhand comic line readings, never letting one of Mr. Ives’s jokes slip by without a little goosing, but never tearing the fabric of character to put one across either. The manner in which Vanda leaps into and out of her role as the worshipped goddess is hilarious in itself, but as Vanda burrows more deeply into the play, actor and role begin to blur together. The dominant position she assumes in Thomas’s play inspires Vanda to become more aggressive in her questioning of Thomas’s motives for writing it. Ms. Arianda makes this seductive cipher funny, sexy and scary at the same time.
Mr. Bentley, whose résumé is dominated by film credits (his breakout role was in “American Beauty”), is a less forceful stage presence, although his piercing eyes suggest the possibility of simmering depths. He’s more effective in the play within the play, tackling the role of the submissive aristocrat with a vague European accent, than he is as the playwright, whose outbursts at Vanda’s manipulations don’t always have the firepower they should.
The play’s structure and themes have certain affinities with classic plays about the eroticism (and the violence) of power-playing like “The Maids” by Jean Genet and “The Lesson” by Eugene Ionesco. But Mr. Ives is a naturally comic writer, so the journey into the tortured emotional dynamics between Thomas and Vanda never quite takes on any serious psychological resonance.
And the gamesmanship gets a little repetitive and confusing as Mr. Ives struggles to keep the suspense building and the mystery of Vanda’s identity — and Thomas’s psychology — elusive. But if Mr. Ives never quite settles on a satisfying solution to the mystery he presents, the play is still nifty, skillfully wrought entertainment, an enjoyable game of kitten-with-a-whip and mouse.
VENUS IN FUR
By David Ives; directed by Walter Bobbie; sets by John Lee Beatty; lighting by Peter Kaczorowski; costumes by Anita Yavich; sound by Acme Sound Partners; production stage manager, Christina Lowe; general manager, Jeff Griffin; production manager, La Vie Productions. Presented by the Classic Stage Company, Brian Kulick, artistic director; Jessica R. Jenen, executive director. At the Classic Stage Company, 136 East 13th Street, East Village; (212) 352-3101. Through Feb. 21. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
WITH: Nina Arianda (Vanda) and Wes Bentley (Thomas).
