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| View Larger Image | Venus | Paperbackby Suzan-Lori Parks (Author)
| List Price: | $7.50 | | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
| | Binding: | Paperback | | Publisher: | Dramatists Play Service | | Publication Date: | June 01, 1998 | | Sales Rank: | 333,900rd |
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CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 6 reviews)
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An Exploitation is Amazing Theatre by Aco  4 Stars
December 07, 2004
"Early in the 19th century a poor wretched woman was exhibited in England under the appellation The Hottentot Venus. With an intensely ugly figure, distorted beyond all European notions of beauty, she was said to possess precisely the kind of shape which is most admired among her countrymen, the Hottentots."
The awesome Suzan-Lori Parks here tells of Saartjie Baartman, a historical person, famous as The Venus Hottentot. Parks style reminds of vaudville. Very stylized, fluid in the movement of actors from one character to another, in the direct connection with the audience, in the passage of time and in the presentational aspect of her stories. Through her style the play feels like a carnival show, with boasting and huckster cries, something that would work on a medieval wagon stage.
Venus is about a young woman taken from her home where she was a servant in Africa in the early 1800's to England to be exploited as a sideshow freak/savage/heathen particularly because of her large butt. From there her fame and in some instances, fortunes grow until her death in 1810 in Paris.
There is much in the way of historical referencing here, including what seem to be quotations from medical, literary and personal journals of the day. But it seems Parks created this, because no bibliographic references are made. This is all the more impressive then, because Parks' spot on medical language denotes an era and an attitude. While her dialogue which is written in a sort of simple, phonetic, colloqueal style flows easily from the uneducated Venus and those witnessing her life, from The Negro Resurrectionist and the Chorus, to the educated Baron Docteur, whose double fascination (medical/sexual) with her gets the better of him and the worse of her.
Truly a tale of exploitation and manipulation, about the European maligning of Africans for humorous, medical, fashionable, financial and sexual means. Venus is a tragic figure, representative of the social abuse of Africans by Europeans, whose human qualities become gross examples of a sub-species, the basest form of life, medical oddities and for the Baron Docteur, then surprisingly powerful and moving.
Writes Parks in her bio at the back of the play: "'Tell all the Truth but tell it slant,' as Emily Dickinson says. With Venus my angle is this: History, Memory, Dis-Memory, Remembering, Dismembering, Love, Distance, Time, a Show."
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Parks plays with stereotypes again. by L. Anderson (Phoenix, AZ USA) 4 Stars
February 14, 2002
So who was the Venus Hottentot, anyway? And what is this play about? Not an historical play (although it includes archival material), Parks gets to the stereotype of black female sexuality, while asking questions about our complicity in our own oppression. This allegorical work raises questions about the use of Baartman (the real "Venus Hottentot") as an icon for contemporary black female sexuality, among other things. If nothing else, this play may well have you looking up other information on Baartman.
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Rides roughshod over sexual boundaries  5 Stars
August 31, 1999
Venus's terrifyingly ambivalent character is gradually exposed throughout the course of this short yet explosive piece of experimental erotica. It would be all too easy to write this off as a drugsploitation piece, but a deeper truth is revealed by the powerful combinations of peyote and yage which the Doctor administers to his (initially) unwilling young patients, turning them into voracious, yet compliant, sexual zombies. I found this book powerfully arousing - the Doctor is the very epitome of the fin-de-siecle cult leader, with a monstrous sexual appetite to match his towering charisma - and yet a surprising intellectual challenge. I recommend it to broad-minded adults everywhere.
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Well worth putting your hand in your pocket for - I did! 5 Stars
August 17, 1999
I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed reading this play. It took several attempts, as I frequently became 'overwhelmed' due to the stimulating nature of the material - and you know how it is after getting 'overwhelmed'...you just don't want to read on any more. Anyway, this is very high-class stuff indeed, and compares favourably (on a purely artistic level, of course) with such luminaries of the art as Georges Bataille and (particularly) Russ Meyer.
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Top quality theatrical sexuality 5 Stars
August 17, 1999
Wow! The play really drives home the raw and powerful sexuality of the Gods, and Venus the Queen of Sexuality plays nakedly amongst them all. Some may say pornographic, but the overall feel is of joyful fulfilment and erogenous excitement, transcending the everyday into an orgasmic, almost-orgiastic ritual society of rarified existence. Powerful physical interactions between players bordering on the overtly pornographic in places, definately phallic and in the best tradition of Greek theatre. Recommended for lovers and therapists!
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SIMILAR PRODUCTS |
| The America Play and Other Works
by Suzan-Lori Parks (Author)
Parks brings a powerful African American female perspective to contemporary avant-garde theater--or perhaps it's the other way around. This volume covers her career from its beginning in the mid-1980s up to 1994. All the works are audacious. Black history, black culture and the supernatural collide in The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World. In The America Play, a black man travels the U.S. reenacting the assassination of Abraham Lincoln over and over, as other...
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| 365 Days / 365 Plays
by Suzan-Lori Parks (Author)
"Suzan-Lori Parks is one of the most important dramatists America has produced."-Tony Kushner
"The plan was that no matter what I did, how busy I was, what other commitments I had, I would write a play a day, every single day for a year. It would be about being present and being committed to the artistic process every single day, regardless of the 'weather.' It became a daily meditation, a daily prayer celebrating the rich and strange process of a writing life."-Suzan-Lori...
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| Red Letter Plays (Theatre Communications Group)
by Suzan-Lori Parks (Author)
"In the Blood is an extraordinary new playIt is truly harrowingwe cannot turn away, and we do not want to. The play strikes us as Hawthorne claimed his first glimpse of the scarlet letter struck him, with "a sensation not altogether physical yet almost so, as of a burning heat, as if the letter were not of red cloth but of red-hot iron.'"-Margo Jefferson, The New York Times
The playwright who "has burst through every known convention to invent a new theatrical language, like a jive...
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| Endgame and Act Without Words
by Samuel Beckett (Author)
Originally written in French and translated into English by Beckett, "Endgame" was given its first London performance at the Royal Court Theatre in 1957. HAMM - Clov! CLOV - Yes. HAMM - Nature has forgotten us. CLOV - There's no more nature. HAMM - No more nature! You exaggerate. CLOV In the vicinity. HAMM - But we breathe, we change! We lose our hair our teeth! Our bloom! Our ideals! CLOV - Then she hasn't forgotten us.
| | | Topdog/underdog
by Suzan-Lori Parks (Author)
A darkly comic fable of brotherly love and family identity is Suzan-Lori Parks latest riff on the way we are defined by history. The play tells the story of Lincoln and Booth, two brothers whose names were given to them as a joke, forettling a lifetime of sibling rivalry and resentment. Haunted by the past, the brothers are forced to confront the shattering reality of their future.
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