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Desire, power, sex converge in frisky, seductive Venus In Fur

The final mainstage offering from Santa Cruz Shakespeare concludes the season with a bang — and a crash and a boom. Outstanding thunder and lightning effects punctuate the action in Venus In Fur, an often scorchingly funny contemporary drama written by David Ives.

It's a rousing closer to a season that has trained its sights on the politics of desire, gender, and power in many diverse, unruly forms.

Playwright Ives will be familiar to SCS audiences as the author of The Liar, adapted from a 17th Century French farce. The SCS production of The Liar (back when it was still called Shakespeare Santa Cruz) was one of the most uproarious in the company's history.

Gonzalez and Ibsen: who's auditioning whom?

In addition to his own original plays, Ives' specialty is adapting the work of comic authors of previous centuries, like Moliere and Mark Twain.
   
But  Venus In Fur is something completely different. This time, Ives' source material is an 1870 novella by Austrian literary figure Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (the man who put the "M" in S&M). And instead of simply adapting Masoch's story for the stage, Ives whips up (sorry), a clever bracketing device about a frazzled theatrical director (Brian Ibsen) and a ditzy actress late for an audition (the riotously entertaining Maria Gabriela Rosado Gonzalez) reading through a modern play based on the Masoch story — and confronting all the sexual/political issues it raises.

Directed with sharp-witted aplomb by Raelle Myrick-Hodges, it's a seductive chamber piece for two actors and four voices as the actress and director go in and out of character, the lines between reality and fantasy blur, and simmering, centuries-old tensions between the sexes bubble to the surface.
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