(no subject)

[seekingferret]

I bought a ticket for the Merchant of Venice at Pace University's Schimmel Center this Thursday, with F. Murray Abraham as Shylock. Guys, let me tell you, I saw him do the role on Broadway back in '07 and I've never seen a Shylock anywhere near as good as F. Murray Abraham. I'm really, really excited.

I have very exacting demands for Merchant and for Shylock in particular. This is a play that can hurt me very badly if it's not done the way I need it to be done, but it's also a play that I seek out again and again because if it's done right, if it manages to avoid beating me up, it's full of incredibly sublime theatrical moments.

My Merchant is the story of a single father trying to raise his daughter to know good from evil in a world where good and evil have been flipped on their head. Somehow Shylock has been miscast as a demon, somehow Jessica has been turned against him, and Shylock doesn't understand why it's happening. All that's left to him is to try to teach her what Judaism is, why he lives his life according to its inscrutable laws, why something so simple as a business lunch has turned into a mortal insult to Antonio because God decreed it had to be that way.

It's easy to pity Shylock, but that's not what Shakespeare wanted out of him, and I think it's a failure of the actors' and director's imagination if that's all you get out of him. If it's done right, you see the strength in Shylock's moral intransigence. You see his fiery wit and his rapid intelligence. If it's done right, Shylock instead of Antonio becomes the hero of the play, and he becomes a tragic hero as noble as Hamlet or Oedipus: Flawed men of great power and great weakness who bring about their own downfall rather than letting cruel fate bring it down on them.

And oh lord, I can't describe the ache I feel when I hear "My daughter, my ducats."



In two weeks I'll see The Elixir of Love at New York City Opera as I begin a two week period where I'll be spending a lot of time in the Koch Theater. That'll be followed by a John Zorn "Masada Marathon" where he'll be trotting out endless musical configurations to play music from the Masada songbook of experimental neo-klezmer/jazz/lordknows what. And then the Schoenberg/Zorn/Feldman monodrama triple bill. Whee, that'll be fun. I'm making Lee join me for Masada and Noah for the monodramas. I'd hoped Michelle would be available for the Donizetti, but that's seeming unlikely. Still need someone to see that with me.

In any case, I'll be running into my birthday on a theater high, I hope.

Comments

[starlady]

I'm not sure I've ever really thought of Antonio as the hero of Merchant, now that I think about it. Shylock and Portia are so much more dynamic than he is.

[seekingferret]

It's a complicated text, but it seems clear to me that a straight reading of it makes it a comedy with Antonio as the lead and Shylock the antagonist who meets his comeuppance at the end. And remarkably, we have contemporary stagings that play it that way still. (The Michael Radford movie, with Jeremy Irons flirting with Bassanio, toying with Shylock with a handsome smile on his face, skipping through the movie as if nothing can touch him, hits way too many of those notes for me.) The problem with Merchant is that Shakespeare was too smart, too clever to create a mere stock villain. Shylock is too alive to serve the role the drama designates for him.

[starlady]

I remember liking that movie at the time, but I've only seen it the once.

But you're right that Shylock escapes the boundaries of his role, or maybe transcends--I've certainly never thought of the play as a comedy, for all that it ends happily for some of the characters.

[seekingferret]

This line in the Wikipedia article inadvertently sums up my objections to his film: "The director, Michael Radford, believed that Shylock was Shakespeare's first tragic hero, who reaches a catastrophe due to his own flaws[1]: thus the film does not show Shylock purely as a villain, but partly also as a victim."

Of course, these two lines are contradictory, though Radford never seemed to have realized this. One would never say this of one of Shakespeare's tragic heroes, one would never say that Macbeth was part villain and part victim. Victimization is not something that happens because of your own flaws. Turning Shylock into a victim, as Radford does with some skill, does not exorcise the play's antisemitism, as he seemed to hope it would. It only serves to reinforce Jewish stereotypes.

[silvergirl42.livejournal.com]

Mark just saw this! He told me there was a post-show discussion with F. Murray and the director that is actually sort of about what you're talking about here -- I don't want to paraphrase so I will just copy-paste the chatlog to you.

Mark: so last night at the show
Mark: there was a post-show discussion with f. murray and the director, darko tresnjak
Mark: tresnjak was born in yugoslavia
Mark: he said for him, the heart of the play is shylock's protectivism of jessica
Mark: cause when he was a kid in yugoslavia, there was constant war, and his parents rarely let him leave the house
Mark: and he thought they were just crazy but he learned they actually knew better
Mark: so he saw himself in jessica, and his parents in shylock
Mark: which was so fascinating!
Mark: i had never heard anyone defend shylock making jessica lock up the house etc