In the wake of a disheartening week, New York’s Foundry Theatre and its timely, if twee production worked to apply some light pressure to certain social wounds. Zuccotti Park might be tent-free, but St. Ann’s Warehouse in Dumbo is filled with people gently—and very literally—questioning what we value and what we do not.
The high-ceilinged venue is transformed into a kind of makeshift town hall — audience members sit at two clusters of tables divided by a narrow alley stage. Digitally projected words advance along the tables’ edges, a ticker tape of earnest rhetoric that both invites and promptly dismisses consideration as each question is chased away by a new one.
Written by Kirk Lynn and co-created with director Melanie Joseph, the dreamy, purposefully unhurried How Much Is Enough? is loosely composed as a sequence of questions that draws the audience from birth to death over two intermission-less hours. A designated “Googler” (Mohammad Yousuf) sits with his back to the action, Googling questions as they arise and projecting relevant charts and statistics on facing walls of the warehouse.
Wading into the house, performers Noel Joseph Allain, Mia Katigbak, and Carl Hancock Rux casually introduce themselves to the audience. We’re asked to close our eyes as Mia Katigbak purrs into our ears via St. Ann’s excellent sound system, engaging us in a secular group prayer. “Raise your hands if receiving an extra $200 would significantly affect your life this month,” she asks. You can practically feel the air stirring around you. Of the three performer-inquisitors, only Rux moves beyond likeability. He admits to lying about his name, and requests that we lie back.
Rux: Where are you from?
Woman: New York.
Rux: Nice place.
Woman: No, it’s not.
Lies? They both grin.
Beyond this exchange, the performers spend the duration coaxing tentative answers from the audience with queries such as: “What would you like to graduate from?” Anyone desiring some form of graduation is urged to receive a small scroll from one of the three actors that, unfurled, reveals a Pablo Neruda poem. “But sometimes there is no graduation,” says Katigbak.
This kind of soft-spoken address can feel a bit too darling at times, and the piece, while appealing, has markedly little tension. Most of the audience members wound up participating in a similarly placid way, their replies intimate but unsurprising, the questions often too innocuous to draw much evasion. “How would you define capitalism?” was the only question at the performance I attended that no one seemed confident answering. Why it is that we couldn’t or wouldn’t define a thing that defines us so hugely?
The Foundry’s experiment is at once too broad and too slight. The relentless flow of questions, like the ones projected on the tables at the outset, doesn’t call for much beyond reflexive answers. As well intentioned and elegantly produced as the piece is, How Much Is Enough? is missing some larger demand. As it is, it feels pleasantly therapeutic, too sleepy to be inciting.
If How Much Is Enough? is all featherlight inquisitiveness, Manhattan Theatre Club’s remount of David Ives’ garrulous, leather-clad comedy Venus in Fur goes straight to the interrogation chamber, flickering halogen lights and all.
With a clap of thunder and a great flutter of violet silk, plucked from the proscenium like a hankie from a cage, Venus introduces us to the handsome, supercilious Thomas (Hugh Dancy). Phone to ear, Thomas decries the parade of actresses he’s been forced to audit all day for his adaptation of Venus in Furs, a 19th century novella by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Recessed within John Lee Beatty’s diorama-like set, Vanda (Nina Arianda) clatters into the rehearsal room hours late for her reading, dripping wet and dropping f-bombs, the picture of Thomas’ blight.
Over the course of this fraught single act, Vanda insinuates herself into Thomas’ work and ultimately, his personal life, physically and verbally wrenching him toward the play’s dramatic, puzzling end. It is Vanda who flicks on the overhead grid lights, Thomas bewildered by the sudden, palpable change in the space. The character she’s reading for is also named Vanda; the story, an erotic S & M folly that in time, Vanda (the actress) adopts for her own ends. She convinces Thomas to read the script with her – flattering his ego, persuading him into an accent. “Something Continental,” says Thomas, puffing his chest and speaking in a softened version of Dancy’s own Oxford-educated voice. Arianda’s Vanda never tips her hand until she must, and while we might suspect what she’s up to, we only know when it finally transpires. Their struggle is riveting, the boldly written characters full of passionate, complex intentions.
Ives’ darkly witty, if unsustained, “power play” has other attendant pleasures, namely Arianda, star of the recent Broadway revival of Garson Kanin’s Born Yesterday, (a role that earned her nearly unprecedented raves and a 2011 Tony nomination). Returning to the part she originated in the Classic Stage Company’s off-Broadway production of Venus, Arianda is an intoxicating mix of theatrical excess and painstaking subtlety. Her two Vandas are discrete creations: one a brassy, loose-limbed wannabe actress, the other a chilly, cruel goddess, gliding imperiously across the stage. Each time she shifts, so does the play, in tiny incremental adjustments with which Thomas can hardly keep up.
With a black bustier fully visible through her sheer white-tiered frock, Arianda, along with Ives and director Walter Bobbie, never lets us forget that both characters are contained in one, hyper-aware being. Given a less thoughtful performance, Vanda’s sadism would be sensational. But both Dancy and Arianda have too much control — she wears the thigh-high boots, not the other way around. By its astonishing conclusion, this Venus proves to be in the business of love for the pleasure of shooting the arrows.
While How Much Is Enough? plays out in a repurposed Brooklyn warehouse and Venus in Fur a 600-seat Broadway theatre, both shows contend with our hunger for more money, more success, more sex—one asking if we really, really need that—the other gaily doling out punishment to a character who realizes just a tad late that there is such thing as enough.
To those of you looking to spread the occupation to some Toronto houses, nothing says fuck the 1% in a more genteel manner than local not-for-profit theatre. The Toronto Standard will be attending Canadian Stage’s production of John Logan’s Red, directed by The Electric Company Theatre’s Kim Collier and opening at the Bluma Appel this Thursday November 24th. (And if you do find yourself in New York, How Much Is Enough? Our Values in Question continues until November 26th. Click here for more info. Venus in Fur continues through December 18th. Click here to purchase tickets.)
