‘Venus’ recounts history of one woman’s degradation
Any actress who finds herself playing the role of Miss Saarjtie Baartman — the woman more notoriously known as the Venus Hottentot — had better have a steely sense of emotional balance. Otherwise, she might very well walk away from the theater each night in a state of complete devastation.
That was one thought that came to mind while watching the Mill Theatre’s production of “Venus,” Suzan-Lori Parks’ post-modern riff on the tragic life of the South African woman with the large posterior who was “exported” to Europe in 1810. This woman, initially put on display as part of a circus freak show, ultimately became the horrifically exploited research subject of a French doctor.
The other thought that came to mind was that if this Venus had not existed, she might have had to be invented. For her story embodies all the elements of racism, colonialism, sexism, aesthetic judgment, intellectual measurement and cultural boundarycrossing that have become the focus of such fierce discussion in recent decades.
Parks (the first AfricanAmerican woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, for her 2001 play, “Topdog/Underdog”) unveiled “Venus” in 1996, and its fractured, hiphop style was very much of that moment. Since then, another, far more richly layered play on the subject — Lydia R. Diamond’s “Voyeurs de Venus,” which just received a Jeff Award nomination in the category of best new play of the past season — has appeared. But the two works share many qualities, including an awareness that this story is so loaded, and so laced with pain, that just the telling of it runs the risk of further exploiting the character at its center.
While Diamond gave the Venus story a clever modern frame, Parks seems to have taken her inspiration from Brecht. She gives us a highly stylized rendering of the story — with puppet show interludes, and a Chorus that plays everything from the side show spectators in England, to the magistrates that ruled on Venus’ rights, to the anatomy students in Paris who examined the woman as if she were less than human.
In fact, Saarjtie agreed to come to Europe for just two years, with the expectation that she could earn some money and improve her dreadful life back home. She had a flair for languages (from her native click dialect to English, French and Dutch), a strong sense of her own financial worth, a taste for chocolate and other fine things and, as Parks suggests, a desire to be loved that fit the classic female mold.
Not surprisingly, she was horrifically abused throughout her years in Europe — in ways that were both overtly brutal (as part of a traveling freak show), but also subtle and insidious. She became the fetish object of a married and “respectable” French doctor — a twisted man who was not only ashamed of his erotic feelings for her, but saw her as the key to his big career breakthrough and had no qualms about destroying her.
Working with a fine team of young performers and designers, director Jaclyn Biskup (still a graduate student at Northwestern University) has winningly tapped into the highly theatrical “presentational” elements of the play, but most crucially she also managed to find its heart. Parks’ play is too long, and this production has its sluggish moments, but its strengths outnumber its weaknesses.
L’Oreal Jackson, a newly minted graduate of the Theatre School at DePaul University, brings an intriguing mix of innocence and growing sophistication to her role, and she is truly heartbreaking in the scenes in which she continually asks the Doctor, “Do you love me?” (The Doctor is played by Jeremy Young, another recent DePaul grad, who starts rather tentatively but grows increasingly impressive as the play progresses.) Decked out in a giant bustle framework that suggests her character’s form, Jackson mixes a certain outer awkwardness with an inner grace.
Darci Nalepa brings a smartly balletic polish and Dickensian cruelty to the role of Mother Showman, the sideshow impresario. Leonard House is the folksy master of ceremonies, dubbed “The Negro Resurrectionist.” And Sadie Rogers is particularly expressive in her puppeteering scenes as both the Doctor’s wife and Venus. The Chorus also includes Kevin Cox, Chelsea Cutler Keenan, Bill Hyland, Megan Larmer, Jocelyn Prince, Alyssa Spry, Amy Sumpter and Katy Lacio.
The very gifted set designer Colette Pollard (also still a grad student at Northwestern) has devised a circus tent that easily morphs into a French boudoir and also serves as Venus’ giant skirt. And Chelsea Warren’s costumes have a nice madhouse flair.
One last thought: The Venus story probably never will be turned into a movie. Only the illusion of theater can simultaneously exploit and temper the history of degradation it recounts.
STAGE NOTE: Playwright Suzan-Lori Parks will give a free public lecture about her work at 8 p.m. Thursday at the Northeastern Illinois University Auditorium, 5500 N. St. Louis. And beginning Nov. 14 (and running through Nov. 15, 2007), Parks’ “365 Plays/365 Days” project, an unusual nationwide theatrical venture, will get under way. For more information, go to www.zspace.org.
hweiss@suntimes.com