In detailing the elements necessary for a successful play, Aristotle wrote that each work must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Few would disagree that Suzan-Lori Parks' Venus, at the University Theater through Saturday, certainly fulfills the latter requirement.
Venus, designed and directed by Richard Foreman, DRA '62, recounts the history of Saartje Baartman. Baartman, a member of the South African Khoikhoi or "Hottentot" tribe was packed off to England in the early 1800s and exhibited as "The Venus Hottentot...the one and only goddess of love...the great heathen buttocks." The advertisers don't kid around. As Sir Mixx-a-lot might say, "Baby got back."
Parks and Foreman use Venus' hyperbolic hindquarters not only as an evocative visual trick, but also as complicated metaphor. As Parks writes, in one of many displays of linguistic acrobatics, "At the center of the play is a woman with a big posterior-as in posterity-she's a woman with a past-a big past-History." Parks thus gives Venus a rather self-conscious agenda. The episodic plot stands alongside a desire to examine how we make sense of the past, how we gloss over the tragic and temper the grotesque.
These two competing goals, to tell the story while highlighting its universal themes, make Venus a difficult play to watch. Foreman can't seem to decide whether to involve the spectator in the emotional life of the characters, or to keep the audience at bay, deliberately outside the action. To alienate the audience Foreman uses many stock motifs from his days with New York's Ontological-Hysteric Theater. He trains bright lights on the audience, peppers the scenes with jarring sound effects, and strings wires horizontally between the spectators and the stage.
Elements of Parks' script also distance the audience. The play begins at the story's end (unsurprisingly), the Negro Resurrectionist announces the title and number of each scene, breaks up the action to impart "footnotes" or discuss the origins of chocolate, makes Brechtian use of songs and rhymes, relies upon an ever-present transformative chorus, and intercuts scenes from Venus' life with snippets from a purposely bad melodrama, For Love of a Venus-a sort popular in early 19th-century Europe.
These constant reminders of the plays theatricality and artificiality require great intellectual exercise on the part of the viewer. He or she must consider and analyze the action, rather than just absorb it. Like it or not, few theatergoers arrive eager for this sort of mental gymnastics routine. Furthermore, this routine is complicated by the play's occasional foray into heightened emotion and sentimentality. The audience has its brained picked and then its heartstrings plucked. And ultimately, it becomes unclear whether the audience ought to identify with the more compelling characters or stand coldly aside and judge them. This confusion may account for the 30-percent attrition rate between the acts.
This is unfortunate, as Act II comes far closer to achieving the delicate balance between involvement and alienation which Foreman and Parks seek. Some of this success must be accorded to the greater stage time allotted to Peter Francis James as the lust-driven, guilt-ridden Baron Docteur (think of Lolita's Humbert Humbert as a whiny French anatomist) and Mel Johnson, Jr.'s creepy, canny Negro Resurrectionist. Sandra Shipley, gives a slyly menacing turn as the Docteur's old school chum-"the one who used to pull the wings off of the flies."
Clad in a bodysuit which gives her a derriere "to write home about," Adina Porter, as Venus, finally has some sizable speeches. It's an intriguing choice, for the audience realizes it knew very little of the frightened, half-naked woman it watched dumbly in the play's first half. Porter brings exuberance, humor, and honesty to the title role; her personality ceases to be a mere afterthought to her posterior.
As in most Yale Rep shows, the technical and production work nearly outshines the performances. Foreman, a celebrated designer, has achieved some noteworthy effects. He opts for a non-traditional lighting plan. Lights hang from much of the stage, wholly visible to the audience. Heather Lawson uses these lights to effortlessly evoke both the murky sleaziness of a carnival sideshow and the sky-lit airiness of the anatomist's academy. Phillip Johnston also deserves mention for his creative soundwork, restricting himself primarily to synethesizer and brass instuments. And Paul Tazewell's winking nods at period costuming work particularly well for the eight person chorus. He uses a minimum of props and effects to conjure up troupes of sideshow freaks and bourgeois bystanders. His costumes for Venus are somewhat less successful, jarring with the design motifs of the production and failing to illuminate her character.
Suzan-Lori Parks wrote, "The past has a shape which we place behind us-our posteriors, our posterity-and we move onward from it." While Venus succeeds in many respects-its innovative characters, the dynamic language, Foreman's near-faultless eye for stage pictures-it ultimately tries to do too much, geting mired in its complicated journey to resurrect and reexamine the past.
Copyright 1996, The Yale Herald, Inc. All rights reserved.
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