Venus

It's not easy to read plays. For the most part, they're meant to be seen on stage, and reading them requires a lot of imagination, a different pace from novels, and a modicum of theatre know-how (I can't tell you how many times I've heard people read the character's name before the line).

But, I find reading plays very rewarding - particularly Shakespeare, which benefits from multiple readings, and plays that I want to see, plays that I saw once and want to recreate in my mind...

Venus, Suzan-Lori Parks' play about the so-called Venus Hottentot, is particularly challenging to read because so much is left to the stage directions, or what Parks calls "unconventional theatrical elements" in her note at the beginning. She differentiates between a rest and a spell, and there are frequent passages in the text that read just the characters names and no lines:

The Venus
The Chorus of the Spectators
The Venus
The Chorus of the Spectators
The Venus
The Chorus of the Spectators
The Venus
The Chorus of the Spectators

She also uses inventive spelling (it sometimes read like a text message) to indicate accents or perhaps pace - things that may or may not translate to the stage, but are interesting to read:

The Chorus of the Court
Outrage! Ssanoutrage!
Outrage! Ssanoutrage!
(Order order order order.)

I thought these choices were quite interesting because the play is essentially about looking (if you're unfamiliar with the sad and true story of Saartjie Baartman, she was an African woman who was essentially kidnapped and taken to Europe where she was the object of various vaudevillian/circus freak shows. People paid to look at her and extra to touch her. Even after she died, her pubic area was kept on display in a museum and only buried after repeated appeals from her own country and people.) From an academic point of view, the Venus is really a classic case of the objectified woman - and, beyond that, an African woman. Parks explores this low-point of history and its many aspects - the "other", the non-humanizing, the hyper-sexualizing of the African woman, the pseudo-science applied to non-European standards of beauty, the complicitness of the crowd... the list goes on. I would be interested to see this show on stage one day. Has anyone seen it?