PacRep lands a dark and seductive play about lust, fulfillment and writing.

Venus in Fur is Pacific Repertory Theater’s season opening play and it’s a smart, daring, sexy and complex number, a pyschosexual devolution (or ascension, depending on your mores) that drinks into its whirlpool mythology, power, psychology, theater, literature and kink. It’s a hot work right now. Written by Yale School of Drama grad and Guggenheim Fellow David Ives, it just wrapped in both San Francisco and New York, and is coming to movie theaters in the form of a French film directed by Roman Polanski. It may appear that Venus in Fur is confusing – it’s not. It’s layered and complex, like Russian matryoshka dolls revealing more with each stratum, and the writing is so good it keeps it all lucid.

A playwright, Thomas Novachek (Johnny Moreno), is in a rented studio wrapping up a rainy night of auditioning a string of actresses for his new play, Venus in Fur. It’s an adaptation of an actual book, written in 1870 by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, that tells the story of a man named Severin von Kusiemski (a doppleganger for Sacher-Masoch) who derives pleasure from pain and degradation. Severin finds an answer to his fetish in a woman named Wanda von Dunajew, whom he convinces to become his domineering and cruel mistress. (Dunajew is a doppleganger for Fanny Pistor, who was Sacher-Masoch’s real-life mistress; this yearning for abuse would later be labeled masochistic, so named after Sacher-Masoch.)

Thomas tells his fiancee by phone that the actresses sounded like “6-year-olds on helium… half dressed like hookers, half like little dykes.” He sounds conceited. Moreno, who looks like Robert Downey Jr. in a gray T-shirt and black vest, plays Thomas with vigor, almost barking his displeasure about not finding a decent actress to play Dunajew when a thunderclap cuts the connection. That’s when Vanda Jordan (Elena Wright) bursts into the solitary room.

It seems a cliché entrance – on a dark and stormy night, no less – but it’s not by accident that Ives is playing with these cliches. He’s just getting warmed up.

“Am I too late?” she says, disheveled and shaking rain off her trench coat. “I’m too late, right? Fuck. Fuck!”

“If you’re here for Venus in Fur, everybody went home half an hour ago,” he tells her. She tries to convince him to let her read the part of Wanda von Dunajew. This is where our playwright, Ives, starts constructing his two characters for the coming repartee. And this is where director Kenneth Kelleher begins to move them about the floor of the Circle Theatre like two fighters in the ring, dancing on and around a desk, a door, a pole, a coffeemaker and a divan.

Thomas is educated, literary, arrogant, struggling in theater; in addition to writing his play, he’s directing and casting. Vanda is sassy, ditzy and playful (Wright gives her a Jersey accent), she kids around, cusses, ingratiates herself and is seemingly a mess.

She drops her overcoat to reveal that underneath she’s wearing a black bra, panties, garters and fishnets, what she thinks is an approximation of the role. But it only reinforces to Thomas his suspicion that she’s not intellectually up to his dense material. Then she pulls out a white, long-sleeve, gothic Victorian dress from a bag and shows it to Thomas.

“It is very 1870,” Thomas says, surprised at her aptitude in pinpointing this period detail. He lets her put on the dress and audition as Dunajew while he reads as Severin von Kusiemski. She nails the proper and demure British accent and the undercurrent of curiosity and stimulation as she meets Severin. Ives is liberal with symbolism: A puritan white dress, neck to ankle, sublimating the black underwear beneath it.

Thomas is impressed, stunned, by Vanda’s reading: “Who are you, frau Vanda Jordan?” he says.

They continue. This time she insists he get more into his character, in accent, costume and emotion. She’s giving the director direction – a shift has happened.

Moreno’s strong show of personality is matched by Wright’s. Her Vanda is obnoxious, fast, crude, her movements sassy and funny, her intentions slippery. She dons and doffs clothes like nobody’s looking, and interacts in near nudity, which is a way of voiding Thomas’s presence or manhood. She seduces Thomas into a spell by luring him deeper into the erotic dialogue, then when he’s nearly taken, she abruptly breaks character. She plays dumb. She’s up to something.

At one point Thomas walks away from her dumbly, but – and it’s subtle, audiences behind him wouldn’t have seen it – Thomas/Moreno blinks as if he knows he’s changing, but doesn’t yet know how. This is acting from two Equity actors that doesn’t lose nuance for its verve.

There is something happening. The play is a layered scrutiny of theater, acting, writing and directing, sex, porn, mythology and morals. It’s a careening game of brinksmanship and power, dressed up in S&M leather and fur, taunting and tantalizing the brain’s centers of pleasure and pain.

VENUS IN FUR plays 7:30pm Friday and Saturday, 2pm Sunday, through May 18, at Circle Theatre, Casanova between Eighth and Ninth, Carmel. $12-$35. 622-0100, www.pacrep.org