Shiny Boots of Leather

Playwright David Ives has more than made up for inflicting the abysmal White Christmas on Broadway audiences over the last two years with his Venus in Fur, a very funny, very ambitious new play at Classic Stage Company.

A freewheeling adaptation of the infamous German erotic novel that inspired the Velvet Underground song “Venus in Furs” (which gets a clever nod via some daunting footwear), Ives has set his play in the quintessential sado-masochist encounter: an audition. Bedraggled and late, Vanda (a star-making performance from Nina Arianda) shows up in the middle of a storm to audition for the role of… Vanda, in a stage adaptation of Venus in Fur by playwright Thomas (Wes Bentley). After much argument and some old-fashioned show biz moxie from Vanda, Thomas finally, reluctantly agrees to let her read for the part. She’s spectacular in the role, much to Thomas’ surprise, and the two end up performing most of the play together. But there’s also something strange about Vanda. She shows up with the complete script but no appointment; she disingenuously claims no knowledge of what Thomas has adapted, but points out differences between his script and the original novel. And she has brought with her a startlingly thorough collection of period costumes. She also reveals a frightening amount of knowledge about Thomas’ unseen fiancée, who’s waiting for him at home.

The cleverness of Ives’ play is that he has his cake and eats it, too. His Venus in Fur manages to be both a stage version of the novel and its riveting modern adaptation as a power struggle between a director-playwright and an actress. Much of the play’s first half is given over to arguments between Vanda and Thomas about the nature of the play. Vanda calls it porn; Thomas sees it as a relationship drama written with the kind of operatic emotions that no one bothers with anymore, a revealing interpretation that seems equally applicable to his reason for indulging in his electrically charged conversations with Vanda. And just when you think that Ives will take the easy way out and allow his play to slide into cheap melodrama, he reveals his hidden, ambitious intentions to remain faithful himself to outsized, operatic emotions.

Nothing about the play would work as well as it does without Arianda, and, to a slightly lesser extent, Bentley. Arianda, who, like her character, boasts a slender résumé, is giving the kind of performance you spend weeks raving about to friends. Her Vanda oscillates wildly from funny to scary, from dumb (she continuously confuses “ambivalent” for “ambiguous”) to sly. She’s fearless on stage (Vanda is frequently clad in just her complicated underwear), with a theatrical power that is becoming all too rare.

Bentley, best known for his role in the film American Beauty, is also a surprise as the tightly wound Thomas. He primly eschews slang for proper English, but Bentley’s darting eyes and sudden silences suggest a repression that’s about to burst. His play becomes something less than an experiment in outsized emotions and something far more personal as Vanda casually dismantles his defenses. And for a show that never veers into the salacious, Bentley provides a shockingly erotic performance as the playwright coming undone by his own creation. Confident and dismissive of his Vanda, he’s no match for the emotional power of the actress Vanda, who calmly wrests control of his adaptation and the audition. By the play’s end, Thomas is as enslaved to both Vandas as we are to good theater. But with both adaptations of Venus in Fur, it’s an exquisite slavery.

>Venus in Fur Through Feb. 21, Classic Stage Company, 136 E. 13th St. (betw. 3rd & 4th Aves.), 212-352-3101; $65.