Sarah Nedwek as Vanda. ©Photo by Jerry Naunheim, Jr., Courtesy of the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis
The name of the Lion’s Paw Theatre Co., explained its Executive Director Dan Kelly yesterday, comes from the fable of Androcles and the Lion. Life, he intimated, can be a thorn in your paw, but along comes art, graciously, to pluck it out (for a while, at least).
His comparison may sound highfalutin’, but Lion’s Paw’s flagship series, “Plays on the Menu,” is a relief of sorts—a relief from a boring midday lunch, for one filled with performances of pocket-sized, one-scene plays by some of the area’s most accomplished actors, right after the chicken-salad sandwiches.
The monthly shows are offered at Webster Groves’ historic Hawken House.
Yesterday’s line-up of four plays included Michael McKeever’s "American Gothic,” in which the characters in the famous Grant Wood painting come to life. The long-suffering woman, desperate for freedom, briefly leaves the painting. She is tired of “staring at the hair in his ears” and wants to try newfangled excitements, like “Pilates.”
Garth Wingfield’s “Please Have a Seat and Someone Will Be With You Shortly,” posits that a man and woman finally broach the silence that has separated them after years of sitting in the same therapists’ waiting room without conversation. Together they create a fiction about who they see the other as (“a carpenter who works while listening to NPR!”). Their imaginary romance reaches the greatest of heights before each admits their real names, real occupations, and very earthly constraints, and the fantasy vanishes in a poof of might-have-been. It was touching.
In an excerpt from George Bernard Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion (see above), a husband and wife encounter the famously hobbled lion.
In David Wiener’s “Bride on the Rocks,” a bride jilted at the altar becomes progressively more and more drunk, as a bartender tries to console her.
All of the one-acts were funny and sweet; somehow, comedy is better for lunch than tragedy.
The great strength of the program (besides the white chocolate/caramel/cashew bars for dessert) is that Lion’s Paw recruits dynamite local actors, including a number of Equity members. Yesterday’s mini-plays were performed by Peggy Billo, John Contini, Mark Kelley, Bobby Miller, and Suki Peters, all very familiar names to area theatre-niks. They brought the material to life beautifully.
"Plays on the Menu," is readers’ theatre. The actors carry scripts onstage, but use them pretty loosely, looking down infrequently in many cases. Audience members may get swept up in the storytelling just as easily as they would with costumes and sets.
Lion’s Paw is offering what is perhaps the only lunchtime theatre program in town, and one of very few lunchtime arts/edification options. It’s worth seeking out.
"Plays on the Menu," presented by Lion’s Paw Theatre, is next scheduled for April 9; for details, go to lionspawtheatre.org or visit their Facebook Page.
It would seem that the Rep may have saved the best for last. David Ives’ Venus in Fur, directed by Seth Gordon, has a sexual intensity and an unflagging pace that keeps the audience riveted for the entire, intermission-less 100 minutes.
Playwright Thomas (Jay Stratton) has adapted Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s 19th century novel Venus in Furs for the stage. The scandalous work of erotica—from which we get the term “masochism”—is Sacher-Masoch’s roman à clef about a man who can only get his rocks off by acting as the slave to his bride.
Vanda (Sarah Nedwek) shows up very late to Thomas’ casting call. In a nutty coincidence, she has the same name as the character in his play. She is, as we say now, a hot mess—wearing a dominatrix outfit to the audition, and cussing up a storm (literally, there’s a thundershower outside) in a braying voice that rivals a Real Housewife of New Jersey’s.
Thomas is exasperated from a failed day of trying to cast his drama’s female lead, and it certainly won’t be this creature, he knows.
She comes on like a kooky, overeager incompetent, but he is astounded when he sees not only can she act, she would seem to be perfect for the role—and, in a magically bottomless sack, she’s brought some really nifty period costumes they can both wear. This freak-show of a person has hidden talents that continue to pop out the bag, as it were.
Soon we’re off to the races. His ideas about men and women are repeatedly challenged by hers, in the play, and in the play-within-the-play. It becomes not so much an audition as a battle of the sexes assisted by a script.
The theatrical experiment the pair is enacting begins to veer off the rails. Vanda gets angrier—and flirtier. When a man insists on casting a woman in the role of tormentor and tease, isn’t that a kind of control itself, she asks, while lounging in black skivvies. Is it not, ultimately, old-fashioned chauvinism, argues Vanda the actress as well as Vanda the character, to demand to be a slave to a woman, to make her your goddess, she asks, while coyly daubing her private parts with a fur shawl.
The play’s electrifying climax owes something to that amazing moment when John Goodman’s character delivers his “I will show you the life of the mind!” rant in the film Barton Fink. Some will see it coming; I didn’t.
On Broadway, Venus made a star out of actress Nina Arianda in the role of Vanda, and she received a Tony. At the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, Nedwek’s Vanda is a manipulative, sexy marvel, transformed from mouth-breathing mook to irresistible avatar of amor over the course of the play. As Thomas, Stratton offers a believable turn as a writer with some funny ideas about love, put to the test by a random gal on a rainy night.
The set is minimal, and constructed on a narrow strip of stage between a halved audience; its smallness adds to the drama’s intensity. Vanda’s wig, blonde with black roots, strikes the perfect note of wanton sensuality.
The play’s great strength may lie in Sacher-Masoch’s and Ives’ understanding of the power dynamics moving just beneath the surface of relationships, like muscles under the skin. Most of us may not be asking our significant others to tie us to support beams and humiliate us, but metaphorically, we constantly ask to be passive, and then, alternately, demand to be strong in the complex push-and-pull of love. It’s rarely discussed, potent stuff.
Venus in Fur, presented by the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, runs through March 24. For times, prices and ticket info, visit repstl.org.
