Dressing “Venus”

By ERIC GRODE

Bags of tricks don’t get much deeper or kinkier than the one Vanda carries into her audition/ambush/apotheosis in Venus in Fur.

Though she seems like a desperate actress with a thick outer-borough accent, Vanda (Nina Arianda) quickly commandeers her would-be director, Thomas (Hugh Dancy), with the help of her roomy satchel. She’s carrying thigh-high boots, frock coats, froufrou dresses and everything else a girl would need to enact David Ives’s sprightly riff on the 1870 novella “Venus in Furs.” Clothes make the man and woman here, then remake and re-remake them, upending any number of power dynamics along the way.

To suit the ambitions of the play, her costumes have to strike a balance between literal and metaphysical worlds. How much is happening in the dingy rehearsal room where Vanda and Thomas initially meet, and how much is happening in a more abstract realm of desire and debasement?

This ambiguity emerges in costume pieces like the men’s frock coat that Vanda pulls out of her seemingly bottomless bag. It’s a green specimen that fits Thomas like a glove, and it dates to the very era of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s novella. (His predilections inspired the word “masochism.”)

“I wanted to distress [the coat] in a particular way so that it could be old and feel old, but without being threadbare,” Yavich says. “It’s all part of this fine line we walk in the play: Is it real? Is it imaginary? Or do the two blend together?”

No matter how evocative they are, though, all these costumes need to support the actors wearing them. In Venus in Fur, Arianda and Dancy, who replaced Wes Bentley in the role of Thomas, have been quite involved with selecting their wardrobe. Yavich says, “Hugh’s stuff changed a little bit, because he was new, but it’s still within a very precise range. He was very, very specific. We brought in a bunch of racks.” And so his fitted T-shirt, which befits a hip young artist, can also be layered with a professorial jacket (when he’s in director mode) or the aforementioned frock coat and even a heavily buttoned servant’s coat.

“A lot of Vanda’s clothes are already built into the script,” Yavich adds. “But we worked with Nina very closely: her body, her comfort level, what she likes.” One example is the ruffled (but see-through) white dress that Vanda puts for the most demure part of her audition. “The dress was designed ahead of time, and then it evolved during rehearsal. We added a second zipper to give Nina some more options in terms of how to take it on and off. That sort of thing.”

Beyond that, it’s up to the audience to do the adjusting. And with each dip into Yavich’s reality-bending bag of clothes, they must adjust all over again.

—

In 2003, Anita Yavich received the

TDF/Irene Sharaff Young Master Award

.

Eric Grode is the author of the recently released “Hair: The Story of the Show That Defined a Generation” (Running Press).