Elliott Bay's Drama Book Group, Stages, meets once a month to read, enjoy and discuss great plays and dramatic works, contemporary and classic, from the U.S. and around the world. In David Ives's seductive, darkly funny Venus in Fur, a playwright-director, Thomas, has written an adaptation of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's classic erotic novel Venus in Fur, the story of an obsessive relationship between a man and the mistress to whom he becomes enslaved. At the end of a long day in which the actress Thomas auditions fail to impress him, in walks Vanda, very late and seemingly clueless, but she convinces him to give her a chance. As they perform scenes from Thomas's play, the lines between writer, actor, director, and character begin to blur. An unsettling drama, a playful comedy, Venus in Fur also constitutes a masterful exploration of the art of acting—onstage and off.

Co-presented with the TOWN HALL CENTER FOR CIVIC LIFE. Many Puget Sound region readers followed journalist Kirsten Grind's coverage of the Washington Mutual Bank failure in the pages of the Puget Sound Business Journal. She has deepened, developed, and expanded that work—for which she and colleagues Jeanne Lang Jones and Alwyn Scott were named Pulitzer Prize finalists—into a compelling new, full-length book, The Lost Bank: The Story of Washington Mutual—The Biggest Bank Failure in American History (Simon and Schuster). "Grind pens a lucid, entertaining guide to the delusions and frauds powering the debacle, from Fed chief Alan Greenspan's rose-tinted economic forecasts on to the falsified documents that put people with no income, assets, or perhaps even pulses, into mortgages they could never repay. Hers is one of the best accounts yet of WaMu's demise." – Publishers Weekly. Kirsten Grind is now a reporter with The Wall Street Journal. $5 tickets are available at the door starting at 6:30 p.m., or in advance via www.brownpapertickets.com (1-800-838-3006). Town Hall Seattle is at 1119 Eighth Avenue (at Seneca). Preferred seating for Town Hall members. For more information on this evening, please call Elliott Bay at (206) 624-6600, Town Hall at (206) 652-4255, or see www.townhallseattle.org.