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Jan. 23rd, 2023 03:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretI love Ada Palmer and I very much enjoy listening to her expatiate about whatever random interests she feels like ranting about, so I've been listening to the podcast she does with Jo Walton, Ex Urbe, and really enjoying it. Except for the most recent episode, in which Palmer and Walton talked to Greer Gilman about Shakespeare stagings they have seen. The first performance they talk about is the Jonathan Munby-directed Merchant of Venice I wrote about five or so years ago. And Oh, Ada Palmer, No!
To briefly recap, the theory of the staging is that Merchant of Venice is a racist comedy, so let's get the audience to laugh and then pull back the curtain and reveal that the audience is racist. The problem with this strategy is if you're Jewish you don't laugh, and then you just end up sitting in an audience full of revealed anti-semites for a couple hours. It was not fun at all.
But Palmer was delighted by it. She argued for some time that Munby's strategy harmonized the dissonance between the Belmont scenes and the Venice scenes. She went on rapturously about the experience of being part of that audience. And it was really painful to spend fifteen minutes listening to someone I really admire speaking with absolutely no empathy for how a Jew might feel experiencing the play. She and Walton talk excitedly about the spitting scene, about which I might again detour to quote Henry Goodman on his performance in the Trevor Nunn production: "Nobody spat on his gabardine, which it says in the play they do, but the audience is so sophisticated in a post-Holocaust world you insult its intelligence by blatantly showing Jew-baiting on stage." But Ada Palmer wants the spitting.
Palmer also made a minor factual error in describing the Hebrew song at the end of the play as a 'song of mourning'. "S'lach Lanu Avinu" is not about mourning, it's a confession of sin and a prayer for forgiveness. It's not a big deal, but it reflects again that Palmer and Walton approached the staging without any serious understanding of how a Jew would comprehend it, or any interest in learning.
I keep coming back to productions of Merchant because in spite of its naked anti-semitism I think it's one of Shakespeare's most beautifully written and structured plays. I disagree with Palmer on a textual level that there is much dissonance between the Belmont scenes and the Venice scenes. They're both about the tension between mercenary pursuit of wealth and the obligations of family and the heart and if you just get out of Shakespeare's way and let the play unfold they cast incredible shadows on each other. In my favorite production, Darko Tresnjac's staging with F. Murray Abraham as Shylock, the casket poems are kept on projected screens not just during the Belmont scene but in the following Venice scene, and they informed each other in amazing ways. Arin Arbus's recent Brooklyn production with John Douglas Thompson as Shylock concludes with Jessica singing not "S'lach lanu avinu" but "Kol Nidre"- also a Jewish hymn connected to atonement, but one that is also about the dissolution of economic bonds. As a story about the connections of money and power and social structure and the emotional depths beneath, Merchant is almost unparalleled. But you do actually have to figure out what to do with Shylock for a modern audience and simply 'tricking' the white, Christian part of your audience into acting racist while ignoring the possibility that you might have any Jews in the audience doesn't feel like the wisest strategy. And I think ultimately this isn't going to change how I feel overall about Palmer, that she is an incredibly smart and insightful writer and thinker about the intersections of history and the future, but anti-semitism is in the oxygen we breathe as Jews and every once in a while it hurts to remember that the rest of the world doesn't live that way.
To briefly recap, the theory of the staging is that Merchant of Venice is a racist comedy, so let's get the audience to laugh and then pull back the curtain and reveal that the audience is racist. The problem with this strategy is if you're Jewish you don't laugh, and then you just end up sitting in an audience full of revealed anti-semites for a couple hours. It was not fun at all.
But Palmer was delighted by it. She argued for some time that Munby's strategy harmonized the dissonance between the Belmont scenes and the Venice scenes. She went on rapturously about the experience of being part of that audience. And it was really painful to spend fifteen minutes listening to someone I really admire speaking with absolutely no empathy for how a Jew might feel experiencing the play. She and Walton talk excitedly about the spitting scene, about which I might again detour to quote Henry Goodman on his performance in the Trevor Nunn production: "Nobody spat on his gabardine, which it says in the play they do, but the audience is so sophisticated in a post-Holocaust world you insult its intelligence by blatantly showing Jew-baiting on stage." But Ada Palmer wants the spitting.
Palmer also made a minor factual error in describing the Hebrew song at the end of the play as a 'song of mourning'. "S'lach Lanu Avinu" is not about mourning, it's a confession of sin and a prayer for forgiveness. It's not a big deal, but it reflects again that Palmer and Walton approached the staging without any serious understanding of how a Jew would comprehend it, or any interest in learning.
I keep coming back to productions of Merchant because in spite of its naked anti-semitism I think it's one of Shakespeare's most beautifully written and structured plays. I disagree with Palmer on a textual level that there is much dissonance between the Belmont scenes and the Venice scenes. They're both about the tension between mercenary pursuit of wealth and the obligations of family and the heart and if you just get out of Shakespeare's way and let the play unfold they cast incredible shadows on each other. In my favorite production, Darko Tresnjac's staging with F. Murray Abraham as Shylock, the casket poems are kept on projected screens not just during the Belmont scene but in the following Venice scene, and they informed each other in amazing ways. Arin Arbus's recent Brooklyn production with John Douglas Thompson as Shylock concludes with Jessica singing not "S'lach lanu avinu" but "Kol Nidre"- also a Jewish hymn connected to atonement, but one that is also about the dissolution of economic bonds. As a story about the connections of money and power and social structure and the emotional depths beneath, Merchant is almost unparalleled. But you do actually have to figure out what to do with Shylock for a modern audience and simply 'tricking' the white, Christian part of your audience into acting racist while ignoring the possibility that you might have any Jews in the audience doesn't feel like the wisest strategy. And I think ultimately this isn't going to change how I feel overall about Palmer, that she is an incredibly smart and insightful writer and thinker about the intersections of history and the future, but anti-semitism is in the oxygen we breathe as Jews and every once in a while it hurts to remember that the rest of the world doesn't live that way.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-01-23 09:15 pm (UTC)I'm very interested now in the different productions you described, especially with F. Murray Abraham.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-01-23 09:29 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-01-24 02:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-01-24 08:15 am (UTC)Maybe I'm just easy to affect in that regard, but Portia's quality of mercy speech is enough to make me hang my head in shame in context. So there's no need to actually visualise an antisemitism the whole play is suffused with anyway. Yes, but the fact that none of the three even considered the existence of Jewish members of the audience... was oddly callous for these people.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-01-24 04:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-01-26 04:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-01-28 10:33 am (UTC)