There’s a divan in “Venus in Fur,” and it’s pretty versatile. At first it’s a potential casting couch — after all, the play takes place during an audition in which an actress, Vanda (Nina Arianda), tries to persuade a writer/director, Thomas (Hugh Dancy), to hire her.
But David Ives’ slick comedy is also about two people ferreting out the truth about each other, and in that respect the couch is a Freudian accessory. The pair act out the play within the play, and unearth secret desires as they engage in erotically charged power games. Role-playing takes on a whole new meaning.
Arianda created her role in the play’s off-Broadway premiere last year, and she’s only refined it since. Her big entrance, disheveled and cursing for arriving late for her audition, is fantastically funny — no surprise to those who saw Arianda’s Tony-nominated performance in last spring’s “Born Yesterday.”
Vanda is joyously dim and breathlessly vulgar, even as she claims, “Usually I’m really demure and s – – t.”
She looks 100 percent wrong for Thomas’ project: a highbrow stage adaptation of “Venus in Furs,” Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s classic 19th-century S&M novel. And yet, by the end, Vanda will feel right in every respect, including some pretty fantastical ones.
Ives and director Walter Bobbie — the team responsible for the hilarious “The School for Lies” in May — take off at breakneck speed, and the stars trade zingers with ease.
The pace then shifts down to a mellow trot as Vanda goads Thomas into facing his innermost fantasies. Reading his script aloud, they weave in and out of character, to the point where you’re not sure what — or who — is real or not.
Vanda is more herself reading the part of the play’s dominatrix — named, not coincidentally, Vanda — than as a contemporary New York actress. But even at her ditziest, she’s in control, revealing new shades of his own work to Thomas: “He’s an oddity,” Vanda says of his submissive male lead. “She’s a commodity. Like all women in 1870-whatever.”
Once Vanda’s agenda becomes clearer, the play starts running in circles. Ives bogs down in his own cleverness, and “Venus in Fur” eventually loses steam. Still, the leads’ natural chemistry makes up for a lot — and it’s fun being left to ponder who’s on top.