out for an Off Broadway production of a BACKSTAGE CHRONICLES new play by David Ives, “Venus in Fur,” the story of a fierce and funny psychosex- ual power struggle between an actress and THE NATURAL her director. Arianda had fallen in love with the heroine of the play, Vanda, an Nina Arianda: Broadway’s new star. aspiring actress, who—in a scenario fa- miliar to Arianda—arrives at a rehearsal BY JOHN LAHR hall to audition for a part she has no chance of getting. In Vanda’s case, it was a part in an adaptation of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s classic about the erotic forms of hate, “Venus in Furs.” “Am I too late? I’m too late, right? Fuck. Fuck!” Vanda says as she arrives onstage, hoping to read for the role of Vanda von Dunayev, an emancipated nineteenth-century Con- tinental woman. The dramatic pitch of Vanda’s opening line captured Arianda’s imagination. “I’d never read something and been so enthralled by where a charac- ter could go,” she told me recently. “The humor is what always gets me. The com- mitment she has to what she’s doing or saying. There’s no comment. She lives it.” The actress who plays Vanda is re- quired to metamorphose from a twenty- first-century street-smart New Yorker into the nineteenth-century European cosmopolitan of the Sacher-Masoch play- within-the-play, and even have the emo- tional extravagance to suggest the goddess Aphrodite, who emerges as a sort of fab- ulous eleven-o’clock number. In other words, the creative team for “Venus in Fur” were looking for a cross between Barbara Harris and Zoe Caldwell. The combination of contemporary and classi- cal performing styles demanded a flexi­ bility that had escaped all the actresses, many of them well known, who audi- tioned during a frustrating six-month search. “We were at our wit’s end,” Ives recalled. “We had the equivalent of a cat- “She had other worlds in her,” her teacher said. Photograph by Andreas Laszlo Konrath. tle call.” For about ten days before the audition, n September 21, 2009, three days year—and more than eight thousand ac- Arianda had submerged herself in Vanda, after her twenty-fifth birthday, Nina tresses registered with Actors Equity; the a rigorous and intuitive exploration that Arianda,O like most ambitious actresses math tells its own dismal story.) For a was more visceral than intellectual. She just out of drama school, was making the couple of months after getting her M.F.A. thought, she said, about “how my back rounds in New York, looking for work. In from New York University’s Tisch School straightens out for Vanda, how my feet a large shoulder bag, she carried her C.V., of the Arts, Arianda, who is trim, blond, feel. I don’t see her. I just feel her.” Her which listed her graduate-school roles: and distinctly Slavic-looking, had taken a awareness that she was extremely unlikely Gwendolen in “The Importance of Being hostess job at the East Side French restau- to get the job had a counterintuitive effect: Earnest,” Ana in “The Clean House,” rant Orsay, which left her time during the she decided to let go and have fun with it. Maggie in “Hobson’s Choice.” The rest of day to hustle for parts. She had just audi- “I just didn’t care,” she said. “I didn’t care her résumé consisted mostly of pro-bono tioned for a show that was being staged in about anyone’s opinion.” Arianda had acting jobs. (There are some ninety-five Baltimore. Now she was on her way to been sent to the audition by the veteran professional shows in New York every Pearl Studios, on Eighth Avenue, to try casting director James Calleri, whose asso-

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TNY—2011_11_07—PAGE 31—133SC.—LIVE ART—R 21502—EXTREMELY CRITICAL PHOTOGRAPH TO BE WATCHED THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE PRESS RUN ciates had seen her that February in her a suitable scent for Vanda. “Perfume is a seven minutes of the play. “She didn’t just N.Y.U. production of “The Importance of big thing for me,” she said. “I have to read the lines as a character,” Bobbie re- Being Earnest.” They had been so insis- smell right. It has to smell like her.” When called. “She brought the entire script to tent that Calleri had e-mailed her the next she arrived for the audition, two actresses life.” For the creative team, the greatest day and asked her to come into the office. were there ahead of her. She tried to hear astonishment was the spontaneity and “We don’t do that very often,” he said. To whether they were doing two or three ease with which Arianda moved from vul- Calleri’s eye, Arianda “was just remark- pages from the script, the last of which gar American to louche European, blur- able. She had a really, really strong point contained several lines in Greek. She had ring the boundaries between past and of view—confident, sexy, maybe a little in- deputized her uncle to ask the Greek present, between the play and the play- secure, which is like a great vulnerability. teachers at her younger cousin’s high within-the-play, in a way that made the She doesn’t look like all the other girls in school to translate and phonetically break sparring between Vanda and the director, the class.” Arianda, whose parents were down the words for her. When her name Thomas, alternately hilarious and chill- born to Ukrainian refugees in Germany was called, she was still reviewing the syl- ing. In the middle of the audition, Bobbie after the Second World War, didn’t talk lables she’d written in the margin of her stopped Arianda and made a suggestion. like them, either. “I don’t want to be the script. “He said, ‘You’re not seducing him. You third Ukrainian hooker on the left,” she Just before Arianda walked into the have to make him come to you,’ ” Ives re- told Calleri. “I can do something more.” room, her résumé was passed to Brian called. Arianda replied, “O.K., I’ll do He gave Arianda his business card. “You Kulick, the artistic director of the Classic that,” and then she did. Ives said, “That is have fans at Calleri Casting,” he said. In Stage Company, who was planning to a very hard distinction to make, but it was the elevator, she wrote his words on the produce the play. Next to Kulick at the instantly there.” back of the card and put it in her wallet to table were David Ives and the director Bobbie wanted to stop the auditions read whenever she needed a boost. Walter Bobbie, as well as Calleri and an immediately. “She showed me how the The script of “Venus in Fur” called for associate, Paul Davis. Kulick glanced play worked,” he said. “I was afraid some- Vanda to strip to her bra and panties. Ari- down at Arianda’s lean C.V. “I’m gonna one would cast her by the end of the day. anda judged this inappropriate for the au- kill James,” he said to Ives. “This is a waste It was that breathtaking an audition. I dition, but she didn’t want just to mime of my time.” Arianda entered the audition don’t know how to explain it. But when the action, so she bought a pair of opaque room with her bag of props, just as Vanda the real thing walks in the room you know black tights and a bustier. She also found does in the script, and performed the first it.” On her audition sheet, below where Paul Davis had written “Bold. Sexy. Funny,” Calleri scribbled “STW”— Straight to Wardrobe.

hen “Venus in Fur” opened at the Classic Stage Company, on Thir- teenthW Street, in January, 2010, news of Arianda’s performance rippled through the theatrical community. The play, which was extended twice, became the longest-running show in the C.S.C.’s forty-year history, and a Broadway trans- fer was planned. (The Broadway produc- tion opens on November 8th, at the Samuel J. Friedman.) “We had a lot of repeat business. People kept coming back to see Nina again,” Kulick said. “Very, very rare,” the director Mike Nichols, who saw the show twice, said of her per- formance. As comparisons, “I can think of Judy Holliday and Meryl Streep. They were a tremendous shock the first time they were seen in a play.” Arianda, like Holliday, he added, was “a funny girl who could act her ass off.” Other direc- tors agreed. Woody Allen hired her for a cameo in his movie “Midnight in Paris,” then regretted not having a larger part for her. Doug Hughes, who had directed “Doubt” and “Oleanna” on Broadway, likened his first sighting of Arianda to

TNY—2011_11_07—PAGE 32—133SC.32—133SC.—LIVE ART A16135 “what it must have been like to walk into know what ‘American’ is,” she said. “I she told me. “The ghosts. The history. Ev- the Lion and see Barbra Streisand in know what Ukrainian is. We’re happy erything that lives in this world which is 1960—the three-octave range with no Slavic people. We’re not Dostoyevsky theatre: acting, that community, that mind discernible break. Somebody who was Slavic people. There’s this sense of pick it space. I wanted that so bad.” that young, who clearly felt no need to up, get your hands dirty, make the best of Arianda calls herself an “old soul.” “I wait her turn. There was so much fire it, celebrate.” never felt my age,” she said. As such, she coupled with so much technique.” When the Soviet Union was break- was something of a misfit in school. To Hughes, who had been struggling to ing up, Arianda’s parents wrote to Pres- American kids, she must have seemed cast a revival of Garson Kanin’s “Born ident George H.W. Bush, asking him completely other: tall, foreign, uninter- Yesterday,” was convinced that he had to encourage Ukrainian democracy. ested in sports, and, by the age of nine, stumbled onto his answer. He told him- Under separate cover, Arianda dedicated to becoming a profes- self, “We’re never, ever gonna see anybody sent her own letter, with a sional actress. One day, when who could take that role out around the drawing of the American and she was in fifth grade at St. John park the way Nina Arianda can. We won’t the Ukrainian flags. Bush didn’t the Baptist Ukraini, in Newark, see anybody who will go at it as fero- write back to her parents, but she was taken out of class to be ciously.” Arianda made her Broadway he did send a reply to Arianda. driven to New York for an audi- début in April, 2011, as “Born Yester- In fourth grade, Arianda wrote tion. “The teacher turned to me, day” ’s bimbo-turned-bookworm, Billie another letter, beseeching Pres- and goes, ‘You really think Dawn, in a performance full of sinew and ident Clinton to push the G-7 something’s gonna come of this? sass, which earned her a Tony nomina- to give financial aid to Ukraine. You’re wasting your time,’ ” Ari- tion for Best Actress. Ukraine didn’t get the financial anda said. “The whole class help it sought; she didn’t get a laughed. I kind of crumbled.” rianda, who uses her middle name reply. Devastated on both counts, she For a couple of years, her parents shut- instead of her Ukrainian surname, wrote directly to Leonid Kravchuk, the tled her to and from auditions. “When I Matijcio,A first appeared onstage at age President of Ukraine. “I very much love became ambitious, they became ambi- three, reciting part of a patriotic Ukrai- Ukraine and I want to help her,” she said tious,” she said. She got some voice-over nian poem at a Ukrainian school hall in in a letter that was later quoted in the work but no acting parts. According to Passaic, New Jersey. (She grew up in Ukrainian press. Not only did she get a her agent, she was “too ethnic-looking.” Clifton.) She had spent the previous reply; she got an invitation to Ukraine to From that point on, Arianda attended act- week learning the poem with her mother, meet with the President. Over Thanks- ing classes, including an advanced pro- Lesia, a painter who had studied at giving, she travelled with her parents to gram at the Herbert Berghof Studio, the School of Visual Arts with Robert Kiev, where, at age nine, she was re- where her parents lied about her age to get De Niro, Sr., and who taught English as ceived by President Kravchuk. One her in. a Second Language. (Her father, Peter, is newspaper account noted that “she She attended the Professional Per- a logistics expert for the Department of looked rather tired,” but she “came alive” forming Arts High School in New York Defense.) “Nina had interpretive powers when she visited a school in Chernigov, for one semester before moving with her very young,” Lesia told me. “I would ex- where she made dumplings, attended a family to Heidelberg, Germany, where plain everything to her. She had an un- concert, and danced with Ukrainian her father was posted. She wanted to canny ability to remember and say it, not children. stay in Europe for her university educa- in rote but with a certain personal inter- As a child, Arianda could sing both the tion, but after being rejected by En­ pretation.” Arianda recalled, “Either it male and the female arias of “Rigoletto,” gland’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art was the cuteness or the delivery—I got which her parents listened to, she said, “all and by the London Academy of Music crazy applause. So I curtseyed. I’ve got day every day.” She was obsessed with and Dramatic Art she returned to the grannies and grandpas crying in the sec- “Carmen,” and she loved to play dress-up. United States alone, at the age of seven- ond row, so now I’m going nuts with it. “Every day was constantly filled with make- teen. Arianda’s winding educational Now the skirt’s a little higher. By the end, believe,” she said. She and her mother reg- road took her from the American Mu- my skirt was almost above my head. I’m ularly used the best tablecloth to sit down sical and Dramatic Academy to the still just loving the fact that they loved to tea with her dolls. “We never had a bor- New School, and finally to N.Y.U., what I did. That was it.” ing day,” Lesia recalled. At the age of six, where she was chosen for a class of eigh- Arianda grew up an only child in a Arianda was taken to “Les Misérables,” her teen—out of a field of eight hundred— stimulating, optimistic, and tight-knit first Broadway show. To prepare her for it, in the graduate acting program. family. “We love hard, we fight hard,” she Lesia made paper dolls of all the main The first couple of months were a says of her parents. Thanks to them, characters, and together they acted out the strain for Arianda, who struggled to let her bond to Ukrainian culture is also story and listened to the music. After the her guard down. “I never had brothers and strong. She took First Communion in the show, Arianda was given a backstage tour sisters,” she said. “All of a sudden, I had St. Nicholas Ukrainian Catholic Church, by one of her early theatre teachers, who seventeen of them.” To Janet Zarish, who was a Ukrainian Girl Scout, went to was a member of the cast. “It was like Nar- taught her in her second and third years, Ukrainian summer camp, and still speaks nia to me,” she said. When she was allowed Arianda seemed “exotic in some way, like Ukrainian with her family. “I don’t really to walk onstage, “everything just clicked,” she had other worlds in her.” Zarish com-

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TNY—2011_11_07—PAGE 33—133SC.—LIVE ART R21510E—PLEASE INSPECT AND REPORT ON QUALITY pares the “buzz” inside Arianda to “mole- want to investigate.” Later, Arianda pulled cules crashing around.” “She has a sort of out her script and flicked through it. “I creative restlessness,” she told me. “Un- love this line. ‘Strong feelings will throw derneath is this cauldron of feeling.” She off the strictest meter,’ ” she said. “It kind added, “She has something always mov- of speaks to me. I love that feelings would ing through her mind and her body. I al- throw off something so technically driven.” most feel like acting for her organizes Acting is where Arianda allows herself something inside herself.” to be vulnerable. She learns about her own emotions and about her range as a person ne evening in mid-September, the by disappearing into a character’s psyche. day after she turned twenty-seven, “Venus in Fur,” she said, had allowed her AriandaO and I met for a late dinner. She to explore “white rage—where everything had just finished the first day of rehearsals goes white and you almost lose control of for the Broadway production of “Venus in your body.” She explained, “I get to go Fur,” with Hugh Dancy, her new leading home, but that lives inside of me some- man. (Wes Bentley had played Thomas where. You’re capable of doing serious in the Classic Stage Company’s produc- damage.” tion.) “It felt almost like doing it for the “Born Yesterday” taught her something first time again,” she said. Her excitement even more unsettling. Her character, Billie made her luminous. Depending on her Dawn, the ditzy showgirl mistress of a cor- emotions at any given moment, Arianda rupt businessman, who gets an education can look gorgeous or ordinary. It’s a deci- in the course of the play, was first defined sion. “It doesn’t have to do with special by Judy Holliday, onstage in 1946 and then makeup,” Mike Nichols, who has used in an Oscar-winning film performance in her twice in readings, said. “It’s what a 1950. Arianda, who never saw the movie, great stage beauty is. She can become brought a sexier and distinctly feminist beautiful anytime she wants.” reading to the role. Her Billie Dawn was At dinner, Arianda was still ruminat- more broad than kook, a kept woman who ing over the day’s discoveries. The adjust- traded sexuality for safety, who didn’t be- ment from the American Bentley to lieve that she could be loved for her under­ Dancy, an Oxford-educated Brit, was like utilized mind, rather than for her overused “going from a guitar to a piano,” she said. body. The most startling stroke that Ari- She was thinking about the effect on her anda brought to her reinvention of the of a line from the play-within-the-play, malaprop-prone blonde was to see her as where Thomas kneels before Dunayev, uneducated but not stupid. “I never ap- the object of his perverse desire. “We have proach a character from a negative place,” had enough of this game, haven’t we?” he she said. “Being stupid is not active. I says. “I played my part better than you thought she was incredibly smart, in a way. ever expected, didn’t I? I did all this to save That was a far more interesting thing to you. To show you how much I loved you. play.” She added, “The vulnerability that To cure you.” Arianda recalled, “The way Billie had is something that I invited into Hugh said ‘cure,’ I just started tearing up. my life, more than I would have before the I don’t know why. He made me feel as play.” As she picked at her food, she sud- though I had some kind of illness, that denly looked plain. “I think if you want to something was really wrong with me. He get to know me,” she suggested, “you was so passionate. I’ve never heard it be- should come and see a show. A person fore like that.” might get to see more sides of me.” Onstage and off, swiftness is a defining part of Arianda’s personality. Dancy’s line n the gloom of a late-night tech re- reading had shifted her notion of the char- hearsal, while Bobbie slumped in his acter and sent her charging down another seatI beside the director’s table and the intellectual path. “We walk around with lighting designer clambered onto the bal- such strong convictions about who we cony railing to adjust a klieg light, Arianda, are,” she said. “Then, somehow, some- in a long white crinoline and high-heeled thing catches us off guard, and everything leather boots, stretched out on the rust- you thought you knew about yourself colored chaise longue. In the half-light, the dwindles and is gone. I think there’s a lot proscenium glowed like a bright depart- of that in the play. I don’t know where yet, ment-store window, which shadowy peo- but I sense that that’s something I really ple behind it were dressing. Arianda was

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TNY—2011_11_07—PAGE 34—133SC. practicing her pratfalls, suddenly throwing herself onto the floor and testing how her arm looked when raised in various gestures from behind the chair. “It’s amazing what a rake will do,” she called out to Bobbie. Off Broadway, “Venus” was performed on a platform in a vast semicircular space, so that the audience had to imagine the re- hearsal room in which the action takes place. At the Samuel J. Friedman, the re- hearsal room—walls, ceiling, bank of in- dustrial neon lights above—had been built. Inevitably, with the change of space and of male star, the staging of the play had to be re-imagined. In the scene that Arianda and Dancy were working on—in which the eager Vanda begs the wary Thomas to let her have a shot at the part—the actors “Personally, I think this country was in trouble when we decided were blocking a new trajectory, which to make sliced bread the high-water mark.” began upstage and ended at the chaise longue, where Vanda suddenly transforms herself into Dunayev. First, Vanda tried to •• convince Thomas that he needed to add a part for Venus in his script: domasochistic game of the play-within- magic,” she said. Actors who don’t lis- VANDA: You could even have the same the-play, with Thomas behind the ten aren’t “serving the magic—there is actress play ’em both. I’ll do it. Naked on- chaise, refusing to bend to the will of Du- no play. There is no story. There is no stage? Fuck. I’ll take a freebie. nayev, at the foot: character. They just get into their own THOMAS: I’ll think about it. VANDA: You dare to resist me? VANDA: Why? We can improv it. Maybe wonder. Hate watching that. It’s point- you’ll get some ideas. O.K., I’m Venus now. THOMAS: Yes, I dare. less.” By her own admission, Arianda is VANDA: You little piece of nothing! You dust! You dare to resist a goddess? superstitious. “I believe it’s good to give Arianda kicked off her crinoline. In black things a certain ritual power, because it bustier, garter belt, and high-heeled boots, Arianda began her progress up the takes it off yourself,” she said. For “Born she stood statuesque and freezing, a chaise longue. For the next ten minutes, Yesterday,” she instilled that power into goosepimpled dominatrix. Dancy, an En- she turned the piece of furniture into a lab- the pre-show music (the Andrews Sis- glish gent, took off his character’s green- oratory for various dramatic ideas. First she ters), her perfume (Juicy Couture, and velvet Edwardian long coat and draped it bounced toward Dancy, then she crawled a mixture of fresh-cut grass and honey- around her shoulders. They went on: on her knees; she tried slithering toward dew-melon essence—“very split and VANDA: Imagine me totally naked. him and throwing herself over the back of confused,” like Billie), and a routine ex- THOMAS: You’re not coming on to me now, are you, Vanda? the sofa, readjusting the length of her body change with her dresser. “Are they VANDA: Come on, you’re a big boy. Just to calibrate the comic effect of the outline. there?” the dresser would ask. Arianda think of me as Fiancée and improvise. As the mind-numbing tech rehearsal would peep quickly through the cur- rolled on, from my perspective in the or- tain. “Yes, they are,” she’d say, then When they got to the chaise longue, chestra the proscenium blurred and be- they’d exchange three kisses. Arianda spent a long time playing with came a kind of silent screen on which the Arianda has certain rituals for “Venus the heavy piece of furniture, at first lean- players signalled their meaning through in Fur,” too, but she won’t disclose ing against it like a cat on a scratching gesture and mime. Arianda seemed to like them for fear of losing her mojo. One pole, then kicking and pushing the cum- the foxhole camaraderie of it all; she never routine never varies, though. Arianda bersome prop until it was properly angled. lost her focus or her spirits. She worked her arrives early every night and spends When Bobbie paused to check the color script like a musician looking at a sheet of some time on the stage by herself, partly of light on the ceiling, Arianda sat back on music, calculating which of many ways to to inhabit the universe of the play, the sofa, legs splayed, singing to herself. go. Although at home her genres of choice partly to commune with the theatre’s Stagehands shuffled furniture, electricians are rock, hip-hop, and opera, the music she ancestors. “Everyone who was on that checked wiring, Dancy worked his lines. was making onstage was all jazz. stage is there,” she told me. “You leave Throughout the tedious hubbub, while part of yourself on every stage you’re on. they waited to begin again, Arianda sang “ he listens extraordinarily well,” How could you not live in the air some- and danced in her chair, her body never Bobbie said of Arianda’s acting. how?” She went on, “There is a great losing its thrum of joy. NotS surprisingly, she abhors actors who comfort in knowing there is something When she and Dancy got back to don’t listen—who do what she calls bigger. That gives me a great deal of work, they began in the middle of the sa- “masturbatory acting.” “I believe in surrender.” ♦

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