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PHOTOGRAPHY BY JOAN MARCUS (VENUS IN FUR) " I think the play is going to surprise everybody in a different way." JOANIE SCHULTZ season, Venus in Fur (as Ives titles the show) is a taut two-hander in which an actress's audition for a role in an adaptation of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's tale blurs the boundaries of play. "I'm not particularly interested in extreme or transgressive literature, I'm interested in all literature," says Ives, who grew up on Chicago's South Side and attended Northwestern University. "It just seemed like Venus in Furs would turn into a wonderful play because the relationship was so complex. It's also a love story, and love stories are always good." An intensely intimate encounter that rides wildly through our perceptions of gender and power, Venus is punctuated with a suave and dra- matically gratifying comedic touch informed by a keen literary sensibility and a sure understand- ing of what plays well across the footlights. Ives first displayed his wit in such one-acts as Variations on the Death of Trotsky and Philip Glass Buys a Loaf of Bread. No slouch at generating original material, he nonetheless relishes taking an existing text and running with it. "It's much easier when somebody gives you a story and you get to rework it, refine it, and make it yours. And I am terrible with plot. I would bet that Shakespeare was too—35 of his 37 plays were adaptations of other people's material." Although domination and desire lie at the heart of Venus, it is no XXX- rated treat. "It's sexy, but there's no sex in the play," notes director Joanie Schultz. "Masochism is about the delay and denial of pleasure. And I think that is one of the things that keeps the tension going in the play. For me, it's like a Hitchcock thriller. There's the suspense of what's going to happen next. I think it's going to surprise everybody in a different way." Ives was surprised by the reaction the show received when it played New York, where it was a smash hit on Broadway and landed a 2012 Tony nomina- tion for Best Play. "Beyond the fact that audiences really took to it—because we didn't know what audiences were going to make of this play—was the fact that a really vocally appreciative part of our audience was women over 50. In fact women of 60, 70, and 80 were coming back again and again to see it. I was stopped in the street by many a woman of 75 or 80 telling me how much she liked my play. Which was the opposite of what I expected." And what had he expected? "I thought that young men of 23 would be stopping me," he chuckles. "I thought that was my audience." March 8 through April 13, 170 N. Dearborn St., 312-443-3800; goodmantheatre.org MA continued from page 70 72 MICHIGANAVEMAG.COM HOTTEST TICKET FREE SPEECH AND THEN SOME Hoosiers stake a claim to bare it all in Arguendo. Leave it to Elevator Repair Service, one of New York's most daringly ambitious theater companies, to not only spin a show from the transcript of a Supreme Court argument, but christen it with a Latin legal term. In name (Arguendo translates to "for the sake of argument") and in essence (a 1991 case brought by Indiana go-go dancers claiming a First Amendment right to dance totally nude), the production—complete with brief full-frontal nudity and black-robed justices busting loose from their chairs— expresses the company's determination to mine a variety of sources like Euripides and the career of comedian Andy Kaufman as it fashions expectation-defying performances. "Maybe Supreme Court arguments seem categorically undramatic to some," says ERS artistic director John Collins, "but they've never seemed that way to me. And, after all, Justice Scalia alone is a pretty good theater maker. With him on the bench, you're pretty much guaranteed some humor and theatricality." March 14–16, Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago Ave., 312-397-4010; mcachicago.org FROM LEFT: Director Joanie Schultz; playwright David Ives; Nina Arianda and Hugh Dancy in the New York run of Venus in Fur. 070-072_MA_SC_HT_Spring_14.indd 72 2/11/14 2:38 PM