Venus

Hailed as “The Best Play of the Year” by Time Magazine when it debuted in 1996, Pultizer Prize-winner Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus tells the real-life story of a young South African woman named Sarah Baartman who was trafficked to London in 1810 and exhibited in a Piccadilly freak show as the legendary “Venus Hottentot”. When her appeal begins to wane, she is sold to a lonely French scientist who studies her as a medical curiosity, falls in love, and after her death, gains fame for performing an autopsy of his lover’s corpse. He then sells her body parts to a French museum, where they sit on public display for nearly 200 years.

Broadway actors Andre DeShields and Jayne Houdyshell star in this benefit reading with proceeds going to the Venus Project Worldwide.