Producing the Play (Venus)

Production History

Public Theater 7 May 1996

New York
Under Richard Foreman's direction, the Public Theater's.

Richard Foreman's direction and set design underscores Parks's emphasis on the dangerously tight circle of spectator/object relationship.

costume design Sandra Shipley

For example, in the act 2, a doctor falls in love with Venus, buys her contract from The Mother Showman, takes Venus to Paris, teaches her French, makes her his mistress, and subjects her to medical studies. The exploitation of the cage is replaced by the prodding of doctors' instruments in a Parisian medical academy. His colleagues threaten the lasciviously benevolent doctor's career if he doesn't end his relationship with Venus. "Yr wifes distraught," says The Grade-School Chum.

Anne Davis Basting University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theatre_journal/v049/49.2pr_parks.html

Rather than focus on the subtler nuances of Parks's playful text, Richard Foreman's direction and set design underscores Parks's emphasis on the dangerously tight circle of spectator/object relationship. His now signature wires strung above the audience divide their lines of vision and connect them to the stage action. All action is turned outward for the audience's direct consumption. For example, in a bedroom scene in act 2, Venus and The Baron Docteur stand together in a cleverly designed bed built vertically for optimum visibility. Ladders lead up to curtained box seats raised above both stage right and left. The box seats provide privacy for characters' voyeurism, echo the audience's darkened seats, and implicate the audience in Venus's objectification.
Anne Davis Basting University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theatre_journal/v049/49.2pr_parks.html

The Yale Herald 1996

University Theater through Saturday

March 30, 1996

designed and directed by Richard Foreman

To alienate the audience Foreman uses many stock motifs from his days with New York's Ontological-Hysteric Theater. He trains bright lights on the audience, peppers the scenes with jarring sound effects, and strings wires horizontally between the spectators and the stage. By Alexis Soloskihttp://www.yaleherald.com/archive/xxi/3.29.96/arts/venus.html

Suzan-Lori Parks wrote, "The past has a shape which we place behind us-our posteriors, our posterity-and we move onward from it." While Venus succeeds in many respects-its innovative characters, the dynamic language, Foreman's near-faultless eye for stage pictures-it ultimately tries to do too much, geting mired in its complicated journey to resurrect and reexamine the past. By Alexis Soloskihttp://www.yaleherald.com/archive/xxi/3.29.96/arts/venus.html

Olney Theatre Center

Olney, MD

August 25th - September 26th 2001

Directed by Eve Muson

Composed by Michael Wells

costumes by Vasilija Zivanic

James Kronzer’s set

This is a play with music, and some of the music works well. Composed by Michael Wells, the music varies in style from showtunes to African rhythms. http://www.talkinbroadway.com/regional/dc/dc152.html

tracy lyon

Some of the costumes by Vasilija Zivanic are reminiscent of Cirque du Soleil. For the character of Venus, Zivanic has created African garb and a flesh colored leotard that is successful in portraying the character’s nakedness.
http://www.talkinbroadway.com/regional/dc/dc152.html

tracy lyon

Frank Theatre’s

North, Minneapolis

April 23, 2006

Frank Artistic Director

Director Wendy Fox

The balance of the cast comments on Venus’ situation, either as the eight-actor chorus, the participants in occasional play-within-a-play sequences, or as the Negro Resurrectionist (Dana Munson) who uses historical documents to underscore Venus’ exploitation. http://www.talkinbroadway.com/regional/minn/minn151.html

Ed Huyck

Venus is overlong, sometimes obtuse simply to be obtuse and hammers away at its core message with all the subtly of a steel chair to the head, but it also features a striking central performance, a deeper message about surviving exploitation and a string of visuals that will haunt the viewer long after the show has ended. http://www.talkinbroadway.com/regional/minn/minn151.html

Ed Huyck

MEADVILLE, Pa. – April 8, 2008 – The Allegheny College Playshop Theatre concludes its 2008 season with a production of Suzan-Lori Parks' daring play “Venus,” directed by Professor of Theatre Beth Watkins.

The design team for “Venus” includes Ellen E. Jones (sets), Susan O'Neill (costumes), and Jim Sumerfield (lights). Brian Thummler is the production's puppet master. Original music has been composed by Bob Michel. Emily Lewis (Wexford, Pa.) serves as stage manager.

While the play focuses on an event in the past, Baartman's story of exploitation and oppression remains pertinent for contemporary audiences,” Watkins said. “Suzan-Lori Parks is a major American playwright. Her narratives about the black experience are charged with tantalizing puns, repetitive riffs and disjointed meaning. I find her plays both compelling and challenging because they demand that the audience work while watching them.” http://www.allegheny.edu/news/releases/allegheny_college_playshop_theatre_presents_venus.php

The cast, which Watkins notes “has been terrific throughout our exploration of the play,” features Miguel Montgomery (Chicago, Ill.) as Saartje Baartman, or, the Venus Hottentot, James Jackson (Millersburg, Ohio) as the Man and the Baron Docteur, Christine La Rochelle (Meadville, Pa.) as the Man's Brother, the Mother-Showman, and the Grade School Chum, and Trevor York (Claremont, N.H.) as the Negro Resurrectionist. http://www.allegheny.edu/news/releases/allegheny_college_playshop_theatre_presents_venus.php

Journal

The Possession of Suzan-Lori Parks
By listening to "the figures that take up residence inside me," the playwright resurrects a lost and dangerous history--and dares audiences to venture with her into its depths
By Shawn-Marie Garrett

But if The America Play's audiences were denied its unseeemly aspects, Venus's audiences were confronted with unseemliness head-on, despite the idiosyncratic--and ultimately for Parks, disappointing--handling of the production by New York's well-known avant-garde playwright and director Richard Foreman. http://www.ask.com/bar?q=production+history+of+Hottentot+Venus+by+suzan+lori+parks&page=2&qsrc=2106&ab=8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.tcg.org%2Fpublications%2Fat%2F2000%2Fparks.cfm

Parks fancifully presents the character as a full-blown diva looking for money and stardom, who enjoys wearing towering wigs and having her buttocks perfumed. Baartman's is a dangerous story to tell, and many African-American audience members and critics were nervous, even angry, about the way Parks told it. Perhaps the harshest criticism came from the scholar Jean Young, who wrote a reaction to the play for African-American Review entitled "The Re-Objectification and Re-Commodification of Saartjie Baartman in Suzan-Lori Parks's Venus."http://www.ask.com/bar?q=production+history+of+Hottentot+Venus+by+suzan+lori+parks&page=2&qsrc=2106&ab=8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.tcg.org%2Fpublications%2Fat%2F2000%2Fparks.cfm

Article

Suzan-Lori Parks Turns Toward Naturalism
By Don Shewey

As the producer of the Public Theater, he has presented productions of "The America Play," "Venus" (a fantasia about the Hottentot Venus, an African woman displayed in 19th-century carnivals because of her large buttocks).http://www.ask.com/bar?q=production+history+of+Hottentot+Venus+by+suzan+lori+parks&page=3&qsrc=2106&ab=0&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.donshewey.com%2Ftheater_articles%2Fsuzan-lori_parks_for_NYT-pubver.htm Mr. Wolfe said in a recent interview.

"A lot of people are talented and smart and gifted, and that's exciting. Not a lot of people are original. Every time she and Caryl Churchill and Sam Shepard write a play, they throw themselves into the truth of the play and a world emerges. We find ourselves fully engaged, our minds, our hearts and our spirits.http://www.ask.com/bar?q=production+history+of+Hottentot+Venus+by+suzan+lori+parks&page=3&qsrc=2106&ab=0&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.donshewey.com%2Ftheater_articles%2Fsuzan-lori_parks_for_NYT-pubver.htmMr. Wolfe said in a recent interview.

A woman exploitedHistoric sideshow travesty takes center stage in Parks' wry Venus
By Hope Green. Week of 4 October 2002 · Vol. VI, No. 6

Director Eve Muson

Boston University Theatre's Studio 210.

The action moves very quickly, Muson says, with supporting actors playing up to four different characters in a 10-minute span. http://www.ask.com/bar?q=production+history+of+Hottentot+Venus+by+suzan+lori+parks&page=3&qsrc=2106&ab=3&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bu.edu%2Fbridge%2Farchive%2F2002%2F10-04%2Farts.htm

By Hope Green

Scenery is enhanced with slide projections of historical materials, posters, anatomical drawings, and "Hottentot Venus" handbills. http://www.ask.com/bar?q=production+history+of+Hottentot+Venus+by+suzan+lori+parks&page=3&qsrc=2106&ab=3&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bu.edu%2Fbridge%2Farchive%2F2002%2F10-04%2Farts.htm

By Hope Green

Article

Call of the cash
The Merchant of Venice ; Voyeurs de Venus ; The Oil Thief

By CAROLYN CLAY November 14, 2008

Lydia R. Diamond’s new play, being given a credible Boston premiere by Company One (at the BCA through November 22), is entitled Voyeurs de Venus, and therein lies the difference

Stereotype-twisting work opens on a stage that’s lifesaver-like outer ring is a revolve bearing three undulating African-American dancers in lacy Victorian gowns, who are soon joined by bare-breasted white women in straw skirtshttp://www.ask.com/bar?q=production+history+of+Hottentot+Venus+by+suzan+lori+parks&page=3&qsrc=2106&ab=4&u=http%3A%2F%2Fthephoenix.com%2FBoston%2FArts%2F71902-Call-of-the-cash%2F

Sara Washington as she struggles with the implications of turning Baartman into the subject of the 21st-century page-turner she has been solicited by buck-seeking publishers to write. And Sara’s not alone on the hot seat — as she makes clear when, giving an ostensible lecture, she asks that the house lights be turned up. The idea of art as something to be viewed rather than participated in, she explains, is peculiar to Western culture. In other contexts, it’s part of a dialogue in which the spectator is implicated. “That’s why it’s not television.”http://www.ask.com/bar?q=production+history+of+Hottentot+Venus+by+suzan+lori+parks&page=3&qsrc=2106&ab=4&u=http%3A%2F%2Fthephoenix.com%2FBoston%2FArts%2F71902-Call-of-the-cash%2F

Article
"What Happened in Boston, Willie"
Reviews of Current Productions
note: entire contents copyright 2002 by Carl A. Rossi

directed by Eve Muson

Ensemble: Courtney AbbiatiBob BrasswellChrisopher FrontieroKimberley GreenAmber GreyJoe LanzaBennett LeakKitty Spivey

If all of the above sounds incredibly rich, exotic and fascinating, it is � and was. Ms. Muson staged her production in the black box of the Boston University Theatre in �boulevard� set-up; that is, the audience sat in rows on either side of the main floor, creating a long, wide playing area for the actors that ran in from the hallway, onto on the main floor where most of the action took place, and up onto the tiny proscenium stage where �The Hottentot Venus� was performed.http://www.ask.com/bar?q=production+history+of+Hottentot+Venus+by+suzan+lori+parks&page=3&qsrc=2106&ab=8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theatermirror.com%2Fvbucr.htmby Carl A. Rossi

play staged in a deliberately shallow depth of field to suggest a Regency marionette show; the breathtaking recapitulation of Act One at the start of Act Two where bodies and screens spun through time and space; Saartjie�s trial on moral grounds, presided over by an octet of judges part-Greek chorus, part-Gilbert and Sullivan; the grueling tour through England suggested by the cast rotating Saartjie�s cage clockwise while the captive within numbly turned counter; French anatomists mercilessly snapping measuring tapes about Saartjie�s person as if she were already stuffed and mounted; Saartjie�s death in a filthy prison cell; and --- most chilling --- the Baron-Docteur at his podium, raising a handkerchief to reveal Saartjie�s genitals preserved in a glass jar. And considering that all of the above was performed by college students --- still wet or green --- I am still blinking in amazement at Ms. Muson�s achievement. http://www.ask.com/bar?q=production+history+of+Hottentot+Venus+by+suzan+lori+parks&page=3&qsrc=2106&ab=8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theatermirror.com%2Fvbucr.htm

by Carl A. Rossi

Article Review

Raleigh Ensemble Players/Shaw University Theatre Program: The Play Venus Is Wispy, But Barbette Hunter Triumphs Over Gossamer Material
by Scott Ross

The physical production, by REP artistic director C. Glen Matthews, set designer Miyuki Su, lighting master Thomas Mauney, and costumers Diana Waldier and LeGrande Smith, is a carnival: bold, inventive, wildly theatrical … and supporting a play as substantial as a wisp of cotton candy, only less filling.

Feb. 17-19

10/05

North Carolina

There are flashes — all too occasional — of brilliance, as when a British court trial mutates into a music hall turn, a bearded lady is conjured up by two actors and the cunning use of hair for whiskers, and Saartje’s final imprisonment includes the chilling image of a black woman chained to a neck-brace. And yet, with all the bustle, Venus feels curiously torpid; a certain longuers sets in early and never quite abates. I’m not sure any show this busy has a right to be quite so boring.http://www.ask.com/bar?q=production+history+of+Hottentot+Venus+by+suzan+lori+parks&page=4&qsrc=2106&ab=0&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cvnc.org%2Freviews%2F2005%2F022005%2FVenus.html By Scott Ross

There are maddeningly protracted sequences of people counting (gate admissions first, then anatomical measurements), dialogue replicated ad nauseum (and which reminded me of Herman Mankiewicz’s famous pronouncement on Timespeak: “Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind”), dialogue that revels in anachronism (“Everything’s coming up roses,” “blew his mind,” “freak out”), and repeated invocations of the weak rhyme “artificial” with “epistle” We’re even asked to accept Saartje being told that the word “maceration” is “French for lunch” — and her believing it — even though she has at that moment been living in Paris for two years and (we’re informed) speaks the language fluently.http://www.ask.com/bar?q=production+history+of+Hottentot+Venus+by+suzan+lori+parks&page=4&qsrc=2106&ab=0&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cvnc.org%2Freviews%2F2005%2F022005%2FVenus.htmlby Scott Ross

A New Image For Design Education
Oct 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Jake Pinholster
Arizona State University Explores The World Of Video/Projection Design

Venus was selected for inclusion in the 2007 Prague Quadrennial (PQ), along with its designs for costumes (Connie Furr, associate professor) and lighting (Linda Essig, director of the school). They participated in the category for Production: Multiple Designers. The PQ joins The Tonys on the list of organizations that should consider including projection/video as a full participant.

The media for Haroun and the Sea of Stories (left) included hard drawn animations and patterns from traditional Kashmiri textiles. Above, the video design for Iphigenia intermixed live and recorded elements on an improvisational basis.

The piece is beautifully eccentric in its intellect and style, and the design, in general, and the projections, in particular, reflect this. Matthews' source materials included autopsy photos, circus flyers, and animations generated from scratch.http://livedesignonline.com/theatre/new_design_education/

By Jake Pinholster

The show also exhibited a refined use of live camera feeds to accent the show-within-a-show scenes. By using the onstage cameras to give a “privileged view,” Matthews could emphasize their presentational nature.http://livedesignonline.com/theatre/new_design_education/

By Jake Pinholster

Paragraph #1 Production Problems Posted by the Text

One particular problem with the script is the subjects relationship. What began as an innocent and innovative idea, soon turns into an obsession beyond comprehension. An example, Mother Foreman sells Venus contract to the doctor, she initially believes the doctor has good intentions. However, shortly afterwards he cages her like an animal and allows the public and other scientist to prode and examine her as if she is a monster. Due to the inhumane treatment of Venus, the director of this script would need to possibly adjust some of the content so that it is not offensive to the audience.

Paragraph #2 Production Problems by our Context

We here at Sam Houston would be faced with making adjustments to the both the content and possibly the language. This play occurred during a very difficult time. The history of slavery and the treatment of blacks is a part of our history; however, to ensure the right image is displayed throughout the play, the producer might revise a couple of the scenes. A bedroom scene must be directed and produced in good taste with the audience perspective being the focus. Venus and the Baron are in some very explicit and uncompromising positions that could be considered prude by the audience.

Paragraph #3 Other Production's Solutions

Based on the pictures viewed, producers have had to use props or improvise some of the scenes. In August 2001, the Olney Theatre Center produced the play and rather than expose all aspects of Venus body, props are used so not to expose her private parts. Considerations are made to protect the audience as well as the integrity of the play.

For example, in a bedroom scene in act 2, Venus and The Baron Docteur stand together in a cleverly designed bed built vertically for optimum visibility. Ladders lead up to curtained box seats raised above both stage right and left. The box seats provide privacy for characters' voyeurism, echo the audience's darkened seats, and implicate the audience in Venus's objectification.

Paragraph #4 Critical Response

Tracy Lyon of Talking Broadway comments on the costumes for the character of Venus. She adds the designer created an African garb and flesh colored leotards to portray the character’s nakedness. The script was excellent and the production was impeccable (http://www.talkinbroadway.com/regional/dc/dc152.html)
Professor of Theatre Beth Watkins states “the girl…I’ve come here to get rich, I’m an exotic dancer, very well known at home. My manager is at this very moment securing us proper room; and we’re planning to construct a mint, he and me together (Parks 18).
In the following scene between Baartman (The Venus) and Cuvier (The Baron Docteur), Baartman is repeatedly portrayed as having control and options concerning her captivity, and enjoying her sexual exploitation, as the following example shows:
The Baron Docteur speaks “ You can’t stay here forever you know.... I've got a wife. You’ve got a homeland and family back there.
Watkins said. “Suzan-Lori Parks is a major American playwright. Her narratives about the black experience are charged with tantalizing puns, repetitive riffs and disjointed meaning. I find her plays both compelling and challenging because they demand that the audience work while watching them.” http://www.allegheny.edu/news/releases/allegheny_college_playshop_theatre_presents_venus.php