Like a cowboy gone crazy, Speech junior and director Ian Forester repeatedly pulls the trigger of a toy gun. Erratically clicking the pistol, he tries to manage the tempo of the drama-comedy-musical “Venus,” Entity Productions’ spring show. His metronome-like noisiness is in vain; the story of the Venus Hottentot has inertia of its own.

Pulitzer-prize winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks tells the 19th century story of Sara Baartman, a woman who is convinced to leave her home and then forced to parade naked before European spectators who view her body as an exotic anomaly.

But the story Parks weaves is not a fictional tragedy; it is a true one that has only recently ended. Baartman, known by European spectators as the Venus Hottentot, was an African woman trapped as the centerpiece of freak shows in Britain and France in the early 1800s. After dying of unverified causes, Baartman’s body was dissected by Georges Cuvier, who served under Napoleon Bonaparte. He then made a plaster cast of her body and preserved her genitals in formaldehyde. Baartman’s 200-year-old body was housed in Paris’ Mus