Venus in Fur

Samuel J. Friedman Theatre

New York

(212) 239-6200

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This production will one day be remembered for a performance by Nina Arianda “that instantly transforms her from a star in the making into the real deal,” said Adam Green in Vogue. Reprising the role that first earned her attention when this David Ives play debuted at the Classic Stage Company last year, Arianda delivers a turn “that people will be talking about for years to come.” As Vanda Jordan, a ditzy blond actress “with a voice like Cyndi Lauper’s and a mouth like a sailor’s,” she makes her entrance seeming like the last person that a haughty writer-director would want to hire for his adaptation of Venus in Furs, an 1870 novel about “pain, punishment, and erotic power games.” Yet she soon enough turns the tables.

It’s when Vanda starts her audition as a 19th-century noblewoman that the “psychosexual fun and games” really begin, said Charles Isherwood in The New York Times. Somehow, this formerly crass woman affects a flawless accent and becomes “practically word-perfect in the role, not to mention so commanding” as to intimidate the initially condescending playwright. To give any more away about Vanda’s motives and the director’s “true desires” would blunt the play’s effect. Suffice it to say this is one “seriously smart and very funny stage seminar on the destabilizing nature of sexual desire.”

Unfortunately, it’s “just a drop too long,” said Jesse Oxfeld in The New York Observer. In January, Isherwood called the original off-Broadway production of Fur “90 minutes of good, kinky fun.” Now, in a slightly revised version, “it’s 105 minutes of slightly less good, still kinky fun.” Though Hugh Dancy holds his own opposite Arianda, the English actor’s American accent “doesn’t always stick.” But never mind: This show belongs to Arianda. For anyone who thinks that women must “play down their femininity” to be funny, this actress’s “beautiful, sexy, almost maddeningly hilarious” performance should bury that idea once and for all.