As M John Kennedy explained it to me before the show, they had to fill in a space on the application form they completed for their production of David Ives’ Venus in Fur, identifying the name of their company.

“Pickle Theatre” was the result, and maybe that helps explains the image on the poster.

It made sense to me. As in the production of 1939 that I saw on Friday night, live theatre is made of different influences, styles and training, a mix of tools like lights and music and dance and voice, modern and classical mixed: pickled together. Yes it’s fair to say that the result really is a pickle.

We were even offered pickles before and after the show.

But never mind pickles. Let me talk about the reading. I saw the 2:00 matinee in a jam-packed Annex Theatre. It’s not a huge space but we were somewhere between 50 and 100 attendees hooting hollering and laughing.

Venus in Fur is a 2010 play by David Ives, adapting the 1870 novella by Leopold Sacher-Masoch (a writer immortalized in the word “masochism”), and filmed in 2013 by Roman Polanski mostly using Ives text although filmed in French. Although Ives’ play was presented in Toronto by Canadian Stage, I didn’t see it, passing it up due to what I’ll call an anxiety of influence given that I did an operatic adaptation of the novella in 1999, that I was revising for a planned revival that still hasn’t happened.

Like 1939 the play I saw Friday, Ives’ work is meta-theatrical, a fancy way of saying that sometimes we’re watching a play-within-a-play. Unlike Hamlet or Midsummernight’s Dream, the distinctions between the play and the show they put on during the play can get blurry, not quite so clear in either of the modern works.

We bounce back and forth between the diegetic world of the two characters in the play –the playwright and an actress auditioning for the lead role in his show– and the story he wants her to portray. We are sometimes hearing them address the text as a project, sometimes delivering the lines of that project, as they go deeper & deeper into the dynamics of his eventual submission to her, very much as in the original novella. The interplay between the two worlds is irresistible.

Erynn Brook played Vanda, M. John was Thomas, and the reading was directed by Dahlia Katz, who read out the stage directions. As I type this the second reading at 7:00 is just starting tonight. They began by using accents self-consciously to suggest the Sacher-masoch story of Wanda and Severin although things get blurred even further when Vanda starts using the name “Tom” instead of Severin.

In case I wasn’t crystal clear, the reading was extraordinary, a breath-taking exercise that the audience devoured rapturously. We were often laughing at the implications of the story, although at times things got very serious, but this is a story that’s tremendously ambiguous, full of multiple meanings, double entendres at every turn. We loved it.

And I’m sorry there’s no upcoming run of the play to recommend, although perhaps we shall see more from Pickle Theatre, M John and Dahlia.