The tradition of the “Educators’ Evening” at Playhouse Square continues this year, and Tuesday was our first time of taking advantage of that for this season. The Educators’ Evening is an outreach by the theater to help local teachers incorporate theater and theatrical arts into mainstream curriculum; they do this by providing an hour-long talk before a show, and then the teachers can get $15 tickets to the play. It is a great program, and they even feed us.

Tuesday’s play was Venus in Fur, a play about a director casting a woman for his production of Venus in Furs, his stage adaptation of the book by the same name by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, from whose name we get the term “masochism.” The original book is about a man who agrees to become the slave of a woman, with the expectation that he would be treated badly, and he enjoyed the treatment. The fictional play being cast in the real play is the adaptation of the book, and so the real play explores the politics of power between men and women, and between directors and actors, with the role of power switching many times during the play.

Okay. So, how does that tie in with teachers? The focus of the educational part of the evening was the cultural perception of gender roles. We were challenged to try to recognize these kinds of roles in the classroom, so that we did not always assume that boys “act up” and girls are “good.” We were also asked to think about broader ideas, like that mechanics would always be men and grade school teachers would always be women.

I talked with the African-American woman presenter afterwards, and we had a good, if short, discussion. My concern was that we were being encouraged to pretend men and women were identical when we are not (our bodies and hormones are different). The instructor agreed we are different and we should be willing to embrace differences, but we needed to make sure opportunities for both sexes were accessible and equal, as much as possible. She stressed that there was nothing wrong with “being girly” or “being manly” as long as it was an individual’s choice and the people choosing could express why they did what they did. That made sense to me, and I was pleased with that answer.

As for the actual play, it was really well acted. It is only a two-person play, so each player had a ton of lines. It was also a very physical play, with lots of movement and some intense emotions. Finally, since the setting was an audition, we were seeing an actor playing a director who was “forced” to act for the evening, and we had an actress playing an actress who played two distinct personalities. That was impressive.

I found the actual play disturbing, though. I’m not a fan of raw power displays, not a fan of unkindness, not a fan of lying, not a fan of unfaithfulness, and I found the idea of people’s getting pleasure from being abused and humiliated sickening. So, as good as the actors were in this play, and as good and/or funny as some of the individual moments were, I left with a definite opinion that I never needed to see the play again. I am still most grateful for the Educators’ Evening, and I am looking forward to the next one we plan on attending in March – Clybourne Park.