ONLY a week after this year's Tony Awards on June 10th, two-time nominee "Venus in Fur" will close on Broadway. Up for both Best Play and Best Actress, David Ives's adaptation of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's 1870 novella is a half-play-within-a-play, or rather the audition for a play-within-a-play. When Vanda (Nina Arianda), a brassy ingénue from the outer-borough, arrives for her try-out, Thomas (Hugh Dancy) is already getting ready to call it a day and head home to his fiancée. Vanda's late, wet from the rain, and unhinged, but also convinced she has the chops to play his lead, who just so happens to share her name. After some soggy histrionics, Thomas begrudgingly agrees to read a few lines with her. Little does he know that her audition is about to dismantle his understanding of reality, challenge what he calls theatre, and invert whatever power dynamic existed when she first walked in, a wet, windblown nobody.

Mr Ives has written dozens of plays, many of them prize-winning, and has adapted everything from Twain to Dickens to Feydeau. We spoke to him about the work of staging extreme sexual circumstances and the virtues of writing in verse.

You've said before that your original idea was to adapt Pauline Réage's “Story of O”, but that you were thwarted by licensing issues. “Venus in Fur” is certainly a logical plan B, but what is it about the shared subject matter—S&M—that's so appealing to you?
Plays are always about intense relationships, whether they're intense love relationships or family relationships or existential relationships. “Story of O” actually would have made a terrible play—as I realised, luckily—because aside from licensing problems, O in “Story of O” is effectively a passive character. I was drawn to the spiritual purity of the quest she's on for negation, but ultimately that would have never worked dramatically. Whereas, of course, “Venus in Fur” is about two people locked in an intense erotic relationship, and if that's not dramatic I don't know what is.
Power at its most theatrical is risky—on film, it can seem cartoonish. In theatre, though, the exaggerated dynamics work.

That's why the stage is still as important as it is. You can't have that kind of high passion on film; it's very hard to do. Oddly enough, the people on stage are larger than the people on a 30-foot screen, so their passions can be larger too.

Explain how you adapted the novel—what you chose to keep, what you threw out, how you edited it together.
The play actually began with me doing a straight, full-length adaptation of the novel. Four actors, set in period. Once I had that, I basically took that adaptation and edited it for whatever was most dramatic and used that for the play-within-a-play. I wrote what's currently on Broadway in about ten days.
You've worked with director Walter Bobbie before. How cooperative is your relationship?

I usually bring him a finished script and he decides whether he likes it or doesn't like it or has thoughts abut it. Necessarily, I'm always involved in casting, as any playwright is, because the whole process of putting on a play is a collaborative, organic effort on the part of a bunch of people trying to think alike.
Were you present for Nina Arianda's audition?

I was present for all the auditions.
And how did it compare to her audition in the play?

Actually Nina's audition was exactly like her audition in the play, which helped to erase the line even further between theatre and reality. We had never heard of her; she had a resume with nothing on it. She seemed utterly green and unfit for the job. But we had been casting for six months and not found anybody. When she opened her mouth, every hair on all the bodies in the room stood up, and we knew that we'd found her. I think that she got the call telling her that she had the job when she was actually on her way to the subway from the audition. It happened really fast. But there were curious things that have nothing to do with her talent—like the fact that Vanda is an army brat and Nina really is an army brat. And then, of course, “Arianda” rhymes with “Vanda”. It was fate.
What are you working on now?

I'm adapting a verse comedy from 1738 for the Washington Shakespeare Company. I've done two verse comedies, both of which were hits—“The “Liar” and “The Heir Apparent”—so I seemed to have found my way into being a verse translator/adaptor for French classical comedy.
What about French classical comedy are you attracted to?

It's fun. Verse comedy is interesting to me because of the challenge of writing in rhymed couplets, which is not a form that's usually amenable to English, yet to me it gives great possibility for comedy. When I did my first verse comedy, I realized that there was this incredible musical/comedic instrument available to me. Working in verse is a way to compress language but also explode language and make it more expressive. Prose, after all—especially realistic prose— is a pretty depressing instrument, really. It's like playing on a harmonica instead of a piano. I think everything should be in verse. The New York Times should be in verse.

"Venus in Fur" is on Broadway until June 17th