The 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 skirts. It’s one of many dreams that will plague pop-cultural anthropologist 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.”
Well, Voyeurs de Venus is certainly not television — unless we’re collectively channel flipping. That Diamond and director Summer L. Williams keep such a tight lasso around the play, prodding its history, spectacle, nightmare, minstrelsy, marital infidelity, scholarly sell-out, and search for racial identity in one direction is a sign of no little assurance. Company One fielded a lively staging of Diamond’s deft adaptation of Toni Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye, last season. But that was simpler if lyrical stuff, with nowhere near the difficulty of the theatrical war of words and images fought in Sara Washington’s brain, at the center of which Baartman sits quietly carving her memoir into the tissue as Sara’s accommodating white husband, black publisher/lover, and a horde of sinister buffoons from the past wreak their tragicomic havoc.
Voyeurs de Venus is arguably overstuffed. But under Williams’s baton, the songs and dances, bursting from behind a diaphanous curtain of streamers, pulse and flow. Most of the performances underline the contrast between casual if urgent contemporaneousness and luridly tinged, repressive Victoriana. As Sara, Kortney Adams mixes smarts and sassiness with a tightly coiled insecurity. And as Saartjie, regally gathering her dignity whatever the degrading circumstance, Marvelyn McFarlane haunts us as surely as she does the biographer struggling not to sell her out.
The green-eyed monster meets a black-eyed one in The Oil Thief, an eloquently written new play about the intimidating passage of time in both the earth’s life and our own individual ones. In this world premiere well directed by Judy Braha and handsomely designed by Jon Savage (at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre through November 23), Joyce Van Dyke’s mix of romantic melodrama and sometimes murky metaphor applies its Geiger counter to both the impending peak — and possible end — of the world’s reliance on oil and to a longtime liaison whose rich vein is not so much dried up as gushing less than it used to. At the center of all the ebbing is Amy, a middle-aged hot-shot geologist superbly played by Melinda Lopez as a woman whose mining of an ancient elixir has made her acutely aware of both her guilt in its Third World-exploitive acquisition and her mortality. The vial of crude she cherishes as a talisman may be 65 million years old, but she won’t be. Nor will she and her partner, an aging actor named Rex, live as long as the Hamlet in which he’s playing Claudius in Central Park.
