Venus Keeps Us At A Distance

There is a curious sign outside of the theater where Suzan-Lori Parks’s play Venus is playing that says the production contains “simulated nudity,” and this is explained right away when Zainab Jah makes her entrance and dons a body suit that gives her the curves of the historical personage she is playing, Saartjie Baartman, a South African girl who was exhibited as “The Venus Hottentot” in the early nineteenth century.
Venus is a mid-period work for Parks that was f