Steamy comedy makes regional debut at Aux Dog Theatre

Director Kristine Holtvedt says the two-person play, written by award-winning playwright David Ives, requires uncompromising honesty from the actors.

“It’s a courageous performance. We’re really fortunate to have Brennan Foster and Sheridan Johnson in these roles. The actors must show emotional, psychic and physical truth,” says Holtvedt, who heads the acting program at Purdue University and is visiting New Mexico on sabbatical. “The characters are provocative, erotic and funny.”

The play within the play is about the original “Venus in Furs,” a classic 1870 German novel by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, from whose name “masochism” is derived, Holtvedt explains.

“The book was a scandal, of course. For him, pain is pleasure,” she says.

In Ives’ play, the main character, director Thomas Novachek, is casting a stage-version of the novel, looking without success for an actor to play his dominatrix.

“For me this play uses masochism in a very clever way to explore the roles we play in the theater – as writers, directors and actors – and it asks to what degree any of us control our art,” Foster says of his role. “It’s an amazingly fun, funny, sensual and provocative look at a struggle to control one’s art, career and relationships.”

	If you go WHAT: “Venus in Fur” WHEN: 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays and 2 p.m. Sundays, March 15-31 WHERE: Aux Dog Theatre, 3011 Monte Vista NE HOW MUCH: $18 general admission or $16 with discounts. Visit www.auxdog.com or call 254-7716

Novachek finds the actor he’s looking for when the character Vanda arrives very late for an audition.

Johnson says Vanda uses her femininity to her own ends, but also redefines femininity with her actions: “She has so many tricks up her sleeve. Each one comes from a deeper place than the last and has a bigger impact.”

The play is sexy, but not vulgar, she says. “I was a little intimidated by the costumes at first,” she admits of acting in her underwear. “Vanda is so attractive because she is powerful, surprising, unabashed and unafraid. I’m a big dork in real life, so finding the seductress inside me has been an intriguing process.”

Holtvedt says nothing too graphic is revealed on the stage: “The dominance and submission are the power play between the actor and the director, in the games they play. Nothing is overt; it’s all in the words. There’s no whipping. Nobody needs to be afraid that it is triple-X.”

Holtvedt says that the Aux Dog’s artistic director V.J. Liberatori, whom she had worked with at the Princeton Rep Company, has helped fine tune the themes of power in the play: “It’s about those spiraling concentric circles of power between the characters, between men and women.”