Playwright: Lydia R. Diamond
At: Chicago Dramatists,
1105 W. Chicago Ave.
Phone: ( 312 ) 633-0630; $20-$25
Runs through: April 5
BY MARY SHEN BARNIDGE
What's a brilliant young female social anthropologist to do? Dr. Sara Washington has no problems with recounting the history of Miss Saartjie
Baartman, the South African woman brought to London in 1910 for exhibit as a novelty in a carnival sideshow. After all, research restricted to a community of fellow academics is above accusations of prurient interest—right? But when a commercial publishing house offers her a lucrative contract to tailor her findings for a popular market, the tensions engendered thereby begin to display an eerie similarity to those arising between the so-called 'hottentot venus' and 19th-century European culture—specifically, the alleged Men Of Science who preach lofty principles while projecting their sexual fantasies onto the exotic 'specimen.'
How far will Sara go to render her topic attractive to a public immersed in the prejudices of their own lives and times? How much loyalty is owed Saartjie, helpless in life and even more so in death? And is the biographer's natural propensity toward identification with the personality commanding such attention, what, ironically, renders Sara unfit for her chosen project?
This is a timely question, coming as it does on the heels of Lonnie Carter's recently produced biodrama of Philiss Wheatley, which portrayed the 18th-century African-American poet as a rapper-video Hot Mama. In an effort to determine the point at which explication becomes exploitation, and the extent of the scholar's responsibility in distinguishing between the two, playwright Lydia R. Diamond doggedly explores the boundaries where facts give way to speculation and to outright fiction, wording her discussions in long Socratic sentences dense with intelligent inquiry.
These are deftly interpreted by a heavy-lifting cast, featuring Tania Richard as the ambivalent Sara, under Russ Tutterow's likewise muscular direction. And if Sara's self-doubts sometimes tax our patience as much as they do her colleagues', and if we are occasionally nagged by suspicions regarding the ubiquity of music-and-dance 'dream' sequences, however well-crafted and staged, in plays of this genre, then Voyeurs de Venus has fulfilled its purpose of forcing us to look in the mirror, there to confront the origins of our own assumptions.