By Ron Cohen

                                   

There ae no burning crosses or lynchings, but the racism depicted in Suzan-Lori Parks’ Venus is virulent.

 

This 1966 drama is being given a colorful and bruising Signature Theatre revival. Directed by Lear Debessonet and featuring a vibrant performance by Zainab Jah in the central role, the production renders full value to both the theatrical and thematic complexities of Parks’ writing.

 

Taking place mainly in London and Paris early in the Nineteenth Century, it’s a fictionalized account of the fortunes of an actual woman from southern Africa, Saartjie Baartman. She is lured from her home to become the star attraction in a London freak show, where she is dubbed The Venus Hottentot. Wearing only a loin cloth, she is put on display in something like a cage and treated something like an animal. Her major feature is her enormous buttocks, and the male audience, for an extra charge, is encouraged to grab and caress them.

 

Baartman’s fate on the surface takes a better turn when she attracts a French doctor, known only as The Baron Docteur, who becomes her protector and lover. But his love is tarnished by her value to him as a unique medical specimen. He secludes her in a Paris apartment, has her anatomical measurements taken methodically and looks to having them taken even more accurately after her death. In a further insult to injury, he performs an abortion when she becomes pregnant, and as a final reward, he infects her with a fatal case of gonorrhea.

 

 

Parks, of course, is writing about more than the thoughtless victimization of a black woman in a white society. Obviously, her play zeroes in as well on such hot-button issues as the objectification of the female body, its exploitation and humiliation. She also shows how Baartman, with an instinct for self-preservation, may well be complicit in her predicament. And in a more poetic vein, the playwright examines the human need for love and its entwinement with sexuality.

 

There is nothing simple about Parks’ writing, but it is exceptionally alluring, even when she – and director Debessonet -- seem to be over-adorning it with theatrical folderol. On the plus side, the play’s opening image in which Jah slips into a body suit giving her the exaggerated shape of the Venus is totally compelling. The highly stylized handling of many of the play’s subsidiary characters (in Emilio Sosa’s colorful costumes and Danny Mefford’s group choreography) gives the proceedings a comic vivacity, and the Brechtian use of a narrator/balladeer, identified as The Negro Ressurectionist,  in a formidable turn by Kevin Mambo, adds ironic notes as he moves the story along. His singing also includes some impressive vocal calisthenics.

 

On the down side, the interpolations of a mock play called The Love of the Venus, performed by a troupe of really bad actors (portrayed quite well by the ensemble), seems like so much clutter, although it makes a point. This play-within-a-play is a white, funhouse mirror version of the Venus story. When her fiancé is attracted to the Venus, the bride-to-be gets him back by pretending to be black.

 

 

Despite such distractions, Zainab Jah’s compelling portrayal keeps the audience deep in the story. She imbues the Venus with many layers: a native intelligence, the aforementioned instinct for self-preservation, an inherent grace alongside a heart-rending vulnerability. When Parks’ writing unexpectedly takes a naturalistic turn in the second act, Jah’s Venus becomes an absolute charmer, flirting with and beguiling her doctor lover. John Ellison Conlee’s keenly felt portrayal of the doctor as a conflicted man adds to the richness of these scenes.

 

Gender fluidity is another feature of the production, particularly in the work of Randy Danson, who deftly handles several roles of both sex. Among them, there’s the crafty woman who owns the freak show, and the doctor’s officious grade-school chum, who keeps reminding the married doctor that his affair with Venus is shredding his reputation.

 

The expansive set design by Matt Saunders is another notable feature, imbuing the first-act freak show episodes with a sinister circus aura. In the second act, it becomes a luxurious-looking bedroom in the doctor’s Paris apartment, and toward the play’s end, with the help of Justin Townsend’s lighting, it transforms eerily into a sterile hospital room…or perhaps, it’s a surgical theatre, judging by the doll-like heads gazing down as they encircle the top of the set.

 

It all makes for a showy but deeply meaningful spectacle that somehow entertains even as it disturbs.

 

Off-Broadway play

Playing at the Irene Diamond Stage at the Pershing Square Signature Center

480 West 42^nd Street

212-244-7529

signaturetheatre.org

Playing until June 4