seekingferret: Two warning signs one above the other. 1) Falling Rocks. 2) Falling Rocs. (Default)
The Merchant of Venice by the Arlekin Theater Company in residence at the Classic Stage Company, Richard Topol as Shylock and T.R. Knight as Antonio

I said to my date afterward that I wasn't sure if I wanted to see it five more times or never again.

Arlekin's production is set in a low budget late night comedy TV show, The Antonio Show, that is staging the Merchant of Venice, ineptly and with limited resources. This frame doesn't quite make sense, but I think that's part of the point? I don't know, everything about this production is extremely precisely worked out in a way that seems to say five contradictory things at once, it was at once glorious and confounding.

The first thing they establish, indelibly clearly, is that the intention of this production is to laugh at the goyim. I wrote, at some length, about how the Jonathan Munby Globe Merchant invests all of its considerable energy in enlisting the audience on the side of the Venetians, in order to reveal that that audience has sided with the anti-semites, but never for a second does Arlekin want you to think of the Venetians as anything but fools and creatures of oversized, improper appetite. There is a tremendous amount of sex comedy, there are glorious physical comedy set pieces, there are dumb throwaway jokes all over the place, all serving the deliberate goal of trivialize the Venetians.

But more important, beyond the Venetians, the show wants you to think of the Actors-cum-characters as similarly foolish and incompetent. The actor playing Jessica desperately wishes she were playing Juliet instead, setting up a rich vein of metatextual comedy. The actor playing Launcelot is a stagehand recruited at the last minute because the original actor has deserted, leading to a lot of wonderful physical comedy about his ineptitude and lack of preparation, especially a brilliant set piece with a unicycle. And Antonio is the host desperately trying to keep the show going no matter what it takes. He mans cameras when they go abandoned, fixes the set, coaches the actors when they forget their lines. He even performs Salarino and Salanio, as twin handpuppets. This is, best I can tell, the reason for the late night comedy framing. Because they never want you to forget that this play is being staged and that the actors have agency and that somebody scripted this play and somebody directed it and somebody produced it and somebody funded it. Why? Because whoever those people are, they made the decisions that led to Shylock, an absurd anti-semitic character, a fiend in barely-human clothing, appearing on stage. That didn't just happen, someone (many someones) chose to make that happen. And somebody has to actually appear as Shylock. Somebody has to embody those offensive tropes.

That someone is Richard Topol, who in this production is playing both Shylock as well as some version of Richard Topol. As Shylock, Antonio clothes him in a Dracula cape, Groucho Marx glasses, plastic fangs, and then paints his shirt with fake blood. He is the broadest, silliest version of the bloodsucking Jew, and it is not some accident, it is a choice Antonio made and coaxed Richard Topol into performing.

And so the most amazing scene in this stunning, complicated production is Hath Not a Jew Eyes, where the actor character just flat out breaks and refuses to go along with the anti-semitic stereotypes any longer. He throws his costume on the ground, revealing his actual eyes, and asks the sound mixer to shut off the music and delivers the famous speech not as Shylock but as Richard Topol, who has had enough of this shit. His affect is of a man who is completely done, but also someone who is maybe surprised to be done? Who has been going along with the game, accepting that some tolerable level of anti-semitism is the price of survival, and suddenly is not sure how he ended up where he is.

There was a line I felt sure had to be a modern interpolation into the speech: "[The curse never fell upon our nation till now; ]...I never felt it till now". But no, it's there in the original even though it resonated newly with the moment... we keep rediscovering the depths of the hatred they feel for us. We keep discovering new humiliation, and new reasons to mourn.

From this point, a shaken Antonio regroups and tries to finish the play, but the character never finds his center again as the show gallops recklessly through the resolution of the Belmont plot to get us back to the courtroom, where an unmasked Shylock goes through the motions of preparing to take a pound of flesh from a terrified Antonio while a string of hateful Venetians lecture him about mercy. It is like Shylock is in a different play altogether; When Balthazar asks Shylock his name, he replies, "It's Richard" and I gasped.

Meanwhile, Portia appears as Balthazar 'disguised' in a Superman costume, and besides playing into the deliberately shoddy vibes of the play's comedy, it was... something else entirely to see Superman, this Jewish moral fable, this Jewish fantasy of American pursuit of justice and protection for the vulnerable, lecture the Jew Shylock about the quality of mercy. What mercy do the non-Jews have that they haven't stolen from us, and then mocked us for believing in?

Balthazar's legal maneuver is simplified as the play races breathlessly to the finish line, the happy lovers dance as Shylock is sentenced to Antonio's mercy, which he concedes after being reluctantly dragged back on stage, no longer interested in either the theatrical or metatheatrical proceedings, and certainlynot interestedin anything I would call mercy. Then Shylock is bound and brought behind a curtain, which is inscribed with a Jewish star as smoke rises from behind the curtain and a recording plays El Malei Rachamim- God Who is Exalted in Mercy, a prayer recited asking for mercy and elevation for the souls of the deceased. The woman sitting next to us, a little out of control of her emotions, told us/yelled at ys after the show that we just watched him being gassed in Auschwitz and... yes that is what we saw. I can't really offer any explanation of it beyond that. It was very much not okay. That, too, was probably the point.

Every single detail, every prop movement, every character break in the staging was meticulously planned and executed and the result was riveting and thrilling and...sickening. I return to my original conclusion. I don't think I would want to experience this again, but I sure will continue to digest the experience, whether I want to or not.
seekingferret: Two warning signs one above the other. 1) Falling Rocks. 2) Falling Rocs. (Default)
The Merchant of Venice with John Douglas Thompson as Shylock


I saw it at the Theater for a New Audience in Brooklyn this afternoon. Mostly I enjoyed the experience a lot. Thompson was an incredibly charismatic and moving Shylock. I felt his struggles, the way he seethed with fury at the way he was treated and the way it led him astray from his moral values until he crossed lines he could not walk back.

The problem, if we can call it that, is that he was such a dynamic presence that he sort of sucked the oxygen out of the room. Whenever he was on stage, he drew all your attention. Whenever he wasn't on stage, the show felt more sluggish.

And there was such a clarity to Thompson's performance that I understood everything he was trying to say about who Shylock was and what he wanted. The result being that I spent most of the play mentally trying to make sense of the other characters, mostly Antonio and Portia and Jessica.


-I've never quite understood the function of Antonio's (Alfredo Narciso) performance in Act I Scene 1. What is his melancholy about, what does it mean? The best answer I've seen is in the Trevor Nunn Merchant, where Antonio's melancholy is because he is desperately in love with Bassanio, and Bassanio is straight. That was definitely not the subtext here, so what was it?

One possibility is that they were playing with the idea that Antonio's melancholy is what we would call modern day major clinical depression, and Antonio spends the whole play deep in a depressive episode trying to kill himself. Why does he make a pound of flesh his bond? Because he wants to die. We notice in the final scene, the ring confrontation, that he, having escaped the Jew's tortures, immediately offers his body against as a surety against Bassanio's inevitable infidelity. He hates his body and wants to die, especially if he can be a martyr to Christ in doing so.

I think another possibility I noticed is that there's a very subtle lie in the first scene. Antonio tells Salerio and Salanio that he is not melancholy because he is anticipating his ships' return, because he has sufficient other assets that he is not reliant on their return for his fortunes.


My ventures are not in one bottom trusted,
Nor to one place; nor is my whole estate
Upon the fortune of this present year:
Therefore my merchandise makes me not sad.


But in the next scene he tells Bassanio that he is in fact fully invested right now, that he cannot even spare a few thousand ducats for his kinsman. His speech to Salerio was a flat out lie. He has inflated his worth to his business partners, he has overextended himself unreasonably, he has taken on too much risk. I noticed that when Shylock quotes the story of Jacob and Laban to him, he distinguishes it from usury by calling it a 'venture'. And ventures are not anti-Christian, in fact ventures are noble. But ventures are terrifying, he is sustaining way too much financial risk and there is nothing he can do but spend the entire play stewing in an ever deepening well of anxiety. Antonio's final appearance in the play concludes with Portia telling him that she has news that three of his ships have finally made it back to Venice. The play is called The Merchant of Venice and it is bookended by the melancholy speech and the return of his ships. Methinks there is structure there.


-Meanwhile, Portia (Isabel Arraiza) and Jessica (Danaya Esperanza), who were increasingly set up as foils the more the play ran on. Unlike Jessica, there is investment in who Portia is in the first few acts, but nonetheless it's not much. Hers is not a particularly young Portia, there is something of the Girlboss in the way she is costumed. She strikes you as the kind of person who doesn't actually want to have any of her suitors win her hand in marriage, she is comfortable running things at Belmont, and she is comfortably bossing around her servants and not having anyone challenge her. This is the most standoffish I've ever seen a Portia/Nerissa relationship.

We don't see anything of significance of Jessica before intermission, but after intermission they took a lot of time to show her increasing realization that running off with Lorenzo is a mistake. Shakespeare gives Jessica and Lorenzo a punch-punch-kiss teasing scene at Belmont before Portia returns- in this version they play it straight, with no teasing and no reconciliation. Jessica quickly tires of Lorenzo telling her what to do and how to feel- she is her own woman, like Portia, After all, she is the one who created the plan to escape Shylock, she wants to be an independent woman and Lorenzo does not appear capable of letting her.

Similarly, the reconciliations of Portia and Bassanio and Nerissa and Gratiano are played without resolution-- the play ends with Nerissa slapping Gratiano and storming out, showing that in this play's world all of the men have disappointed their women. The end. Except...

Except for the play pulling the oh-so-trendy move of ending the play with a Hebrew prayer. In the Munby Merchant it's S'lach Lanu Avinu. In Nunn's it's Eishet Chayil. Which was it this time? Kol Nidrei. Apparently because so much of the play is about oaths and bonds, and Kol Nidrei is about nullifying oaths. This sort of works on its own, it's kind of a clever idea, but what elevated it to emotionally devastating and brought me to tears is that it's both Shylock and Jessica (in separate places) reciting it in unison. Realizing that the most important bond in the play is the one between Shylock and Jessica, and therefore showing them both realizing that they have failed each other and trying desperately to ask God to help them fix it. Oh, my heart.
seekingferret: Two warning signs one above the other. 1) Falling Rocks. 2) Falling Rocs. (Default)
1973 Directed by John Sichel (after Jonathan Miller), Laurence Olivier as Shylock


Stylistically very old fashioned feeling, which made for something of an adjustment, but it is very well acted in its style and very well directed.

In general, the film chooses to downplay the Judaism of Shylock and the anti-semitism of the text, which kind of surprisingly eases some of my problems with it. Olivier plays Shylock as a cruel, ambitious, but stiff-upper-lip Anglo-Jewish banker who is playing a very dangerous game against Antonio, a cruel, ambitious, stiff-upper-lip, fully Anglo banker. Religion is a subtext for two men who don't wear their faith on their sleeve, or perhaps, whose only faith is money. Religion obviously matters to the text, but Sichel/and/or Miller are not that interested in being faithful to the text, so much as they're interested in being faithful to the play. Lines that invoke Christianity or Judaism tend to get skated over or skipped- the whole "I hate him for he is a Christian" soliloquy is left out, making for a much less sinister-seeming Shylock, but also a much less Jewish-seeming Shylock.

The film's disinterest in Shylock as a Jew is inadvertently (and a little infuriatingly) emphasized in a staging goof where Shylock kisses a mezuzah placed on the left doorpost, rather than the right where it should be. So I should say that while making Merchant of Venice a story about the perils of high capitalism where the faiths of its protagonist and antagonist are irrelevant eases some of my problems with the play, it certainly is not a solution without its own issues.

The trial scene sees a brilliant Portia as a catspaw for the vicious Antonio, who shows none of the agony and fear common in other productions- when he is ordered to lay bare his breast for Shylock's knife, he removes his suit coat, but leaves on a waistcoast and a shirt and looks perfectly calm. When he emerges from the trial victorious he suavely puts his coat back on and strolls out of the courtroom. He is a man used to risking much- and winning. Shylock, too, is a warrior- but his daughter's disappearance throws him off his stride. He does not act meanly in the courtroom. He moves with the confidence of a man with a carefully laid plan, who then sees that plan overturned at the last moment by an unforeseen trick. He is humiliated and wounded, but he takes it as part of the game.

Weirdly, the production ends with Jessica reciting Kaddish for her father, another apparent misunderstanding of how Judaism works. At some level, Merchant is a play about Judaism and its relationship to Christianity, and for all the good things in the Olivier Merchant, it fails to intelligently confront this fundamental element, and the result is disappointing.
seekingferret: Two warning signs one above the other. 1) Falling Rocks. 2) Falling Rocs. (Default)
Because my brain fixates sometimes?


2001 Directed by Trevor Nunn, Henry Goodman as Shylock

Not always the most moving film, but a masterclass in how to not fuck up The Merchant of Venice. Which is not the most surprising thing given that it's the only Merchant film that actually cast a Jew as Shylock. (I'm not exactly blaming other directors for not casting Jews in the role- it's not a role a lot of Jewish actors would necessarily want to take, and it's hard to ask a Jew to play a walking talking stereotype. But Goodman brings a hell of a lot to the table.)

Goodman on the problem of playing Shylock: "I felt very strongly that we don't want to be too nice and sympathetic to him. We must believe that he could kill someone. He is actually not a nice guy. He is a scheming, dangerous man. And if you try and make him a nice guy because he is Jewish, and I am Jewish, then you throw away the play. You don't feel sorry for him. You become weary of him." YES. FUCK YES. Henry Goodman gets it.

This is the thing about Shylock, this is why it is so hard to satisfy me when it comes to Merchant: If you play Shylock as a walking, talking anti-semitic stereotype of greed and bloodlust, don't even bother talking to me. But if you try to make Shylock sympathetic, you ruin the play. He is the antagonist and the things he tries to do are inexcusable. And if you make excuses for him, "Oh, poor Shylock, his wife died, he has no legal rights, he is persecuted by all the Christians around him," you are trying to excuse the inexcusable. And that doesn't salvage Shylock. That just means you're not actually taking him seriously.

What you need to do to make Shylock work as a real character is treat him as the villain, but take him seriously as the villain with a meaningful character arc. There are many paths a director can take to this- Nunn and Goodman see Shylock as a conniving bastard, an Iago figure. He's the smartest person in the play, constantly playing people against each other, and he is always wearing a mask in public, always pretending to make friends with the Christians even as he seethes inside, because the dual consciousness is the only way for him to survive life in Venice. But the loss of his daughter knocks him off a step, takes him off his guard. He becomes blinded by his need for revenge, loses sight of the original purpose of the scheme, which was to take advantage of a rare opportunity to actually hurt Antonio, and ends up destroying only himself and his family.

Nunn also emphasizes Shylock's Judaism in his home life, by showing him marking Shabbos dinner with his daughter. But this is not the gentle, quiet, lovely Shabbos dinner of the Tresnjak production- Goodman's version is a complicated affair. Shylock is obsessive about making everything perfect, so obsessive that he yells at his daughter about the placement of dishes. She is sulky, resistant, but ultimately they find themselves on the same page with the recitation of Eishet Chayil, the traditional hymn in praise of good wives that is sung every Friday evening before Kiddush. Jessica and Shylock set aside their frustrations with each other to sing "Eishet Chayil" and remember the wife who had once bound them and now creates an invisible separation between them. In the finale, where Munby had Jessica sing "S'lach Lanu Avinu" from the Amidah, Nunn returns Jessica to "Eishet Chayil" as a remembrance that she has now lost both her mother and her father. It is heartbreaking.

Nunn makes the Shylock/Antonio dynamic even more complicated by giving Antonio other faults besides his anti-semitism. Most productions of Merchant I've seen don't know what to do with Antonio's opening speech about his melancholy- they present it as a thing separate from the rest of the play, and otherwise show a friendly, warm, compassionate Antonio whose only fault is his hatred of the Jew. David Bamber's Antonio, though, is melancholy because he is a closeted gay man in 1930s Germany, who loves Bassanio with a powerful but unrequited love that Bassanio knowingly takes advantage of for his own benefit, again and again, even though Bassanio likes women. Antonio knows he is being taken advantage of, but he will do anything for Bassanio out of his devotion, even things Bassanio is unwilling to accept. This complicated psychosexual dynamic makes Antonio's choices seem less noble, and explains his vulnerability to Shylock's predations. It also makes it easier to appreciate Shylock- yes, he is a monster, but he's not the only monster in the play.

Nunn fabulously de-comedizes every joke in the play, while maintaining a clear awareness that they were written as jokes. He transposes Lancelot's devil on my shoulder monologue to a Weimar cabaret as a written comedy bit, where the (on-stage) audience, which includes Antonio and Bassanio, is laughing because they like laughing at Jews. Shylock walks in, invited to meet with Antonio and seal the deal, and the crowd goes briefly silent, only to resume laughing when Shylock departs. He plays the casket scenes as pure horror scenes, where if something goes wrong Portia will be forced to marry one of these horrible men. He dances over the 'complexion' line so fast you barely notice it. Nunn's Merchant is not a comedy, but it's also not a tragedy- it's a work that was written as a comedy but which we no longer find funny. And that's ultimately why I said that it's not always the most moving film- for all the great character performances, it's often hard in Nunn's Merchant to figure out who to root for. It's often hard to take any joy in any character's triumph, because everyone is so remarkably, indelibly flawed and broken.



1980 Directed by Jack Gold, Warren Mitchell as Shylock

Just an absolute piece of shit from beginning to end. Played as a comedy, but not a funny one. The kind of comedy where the characters all have to laugh overly hard at their jokes to tell the audience that they are jokes. The kind of drama where all the characters have pinched looks from beginning to end to tell you that they're taking things seriously, rather than actually reacting to what's happening. The kind of overly stylized, formal diction that thankfully is being excised in more modern productions of Shakespeare. I don't have much to say about it. I quit twice partway through, and watched the ending with one eye while reading a book.

Shylock lisps like a scary foreigner and schemes aimlessly. "My daughter, my ducats" is played for laughs, which it doesn't earn, the absurdity of the Jew caring as much for his money as the loss of his daughter. Antonio is so melancholy he becomes absent, barely a meaningful character. Even Gratiano's pratfalls fall flat. The trial scene was scratched on my DVD, so I skipped it, and feel like I dodged a bullet.

As far as I can tell, the purpose of this production was to create a basic filmed unabridged reference production that high school teachers can screen for their students, a production that takes no stands and makes no waves and follows along exactly to the text the students were given, that any teacher can use to impose their own lesson plan on top of. Maybe it's effective on its own terms. As art, it is worthless and insulting.


2003 Directed by Michael Radford, Al Pacino as Shylock

It opens with a dense textual title card explaining what life was like for Jews in 16th Century Venice, because everyone knows that Tell, Don't Show is the fundamental principle of great storytelling. Why prove the difficulty of life in Venice for Jews by showing Shylock's life and trusting the audience, when you can spell it out for them before the play starts? And because everyone watching The Merchant of Venice doesn't know what anti-semitism is and needs it explained to them like they're two years old, right? The Radford Merchant is much more egregious than the Munby in its obliviousness to the fact that actual Jews might actually watch his movie. From step one it assumes that Shylock needs defending, that if only you explained to the audience that Shylock's life was hard, they would sympathize with his victimhood rather than thinking of Jews as evil Christ-killing usurers. The prelude goes so far as to show pages of Talmud burning in the pogroms of the Venetians.

I first saw this film when it came out, in a theater, and I had a visceral negative reaction to it. I hated how Pacino played Shylock, the weakness in his character, the opacity in his mien, the lack of apparent intelligence. I hated the victimhood narrative that drives so much of the action, how the film tries to at times justify Shylock's actions, make the audience sympathize, by playing up the violence against Jews, as if that violence could ever justify demanding a pound of Christian flesh. We see Antonio spitting on Shylock, we see Venetians shoving and kicking and swearing at Shylock and his fellow Jews. Nothing can be left to the imagination, Shylock's suffering must be writ tediously large.

This time around, I felt more positively about the film, for several reasons. First, the cinematography and mise en scene is phenomenal. This is a beautiful movie that captures medieval Venice in its complicated glory, with its diverse crowds, its nautical merchant culture, its striking architecture. And all of that is worth praising, because it is a pleasure in its own right.

Second, in the title card there is one fascinating feature I hadn't picked up on the first (two) times around- the text notes that while Venice had laws oppressing Jews, it was comparatively liberal because for most 'sophisticated' Venetians, money and the value of lending with interest was more valuable than obeisance to Christian faith. However, says the title card, 'religious fanatics' hated the Jews for charging interest.

In other words, in Radford's vision of the play, Antonio is not a true Merchant of Venice, committed to winning his fortune at any cost- he's a religious fanatic. This is an amazing twist that Radford and Irons actually carry through from beginning- where Radford shows Antonio attending mass- to end- where Antonio's breast is bared and readied for Shylock's knife, revealing a massive silver cross on his chest. Antonio's hatred of Shylock is not personal, it emerges from his own deep faith in Christ and the Bible. This explains his willingness to lend without interest at obvious personal loss, it explains his willingness to, Christ-like, accept the execution of Shylock's bond. Antonio is not typical for Venice, he is an exceptional man whose personal character impels him to antagonize Jews.

I was talking to [personal profile] ghost_lingering at Club Vivid about how the central tension in the best versions of Merchant is on the idea of the power of promises. Portia believes in oaths so deeply that she will not violate the oath she swore to her father even if it mean she end up married to a hateful man. She believes in oaths so deeply that in the trial scene, she will not invalidate Shylock's bond because to do so would make contracts meaningless. She believes in oaths so deeply that she tests her husband's oath about the ring, and finds him disappointingly lacking. Shylock will have his bond, and the Duke will go along with it because do otherwise would destroy the Venetian commerce system.

In contrast to this principle of promises stands Balthazar's "quality of mercy", which transcends laws and which she urges upon Shylock in lieu of his legalism. What's fascinating about Radford's version of the play is that while it's very much concerned with promises and oaths and mercy, it flips some of the conventional elements of the tension- Pacino plays Shylock as far more apparently merciful than one is used to seeing: When Balthazar speaks of the quality of Mercy, Pacino does not look mocking or scornful- he looks troubled. Portia's message resonates with him, as a pleading for virtue, and he appears to be genuinely considering backing down from his cruel demand. Perhaps he is recalling the original loan, when he pled unsuccessfully for Antonio to be his friend, when he made the offer to lend without interest not as a cruel joke but as an offer of friendship. No matter- ultimately Shylock's heart hardens and he refuses to back down from his legalism. Perhaps he recalls that the religious fanatic Antonio never showed him any Christian mercy.

I also like that Joseph Fiennes' Bassanio is clearly marked as an unreformed spendthrift, with far more servants than I've ever seen a production of Merchant assign him before. That was a clever choice, I think, that calls into deeper question the power imbalance in the Portia/Bassanio relationship as well as the Antonio/Bassanio relationship.

I still think it is a weaker set of choices than Nunn's. I still think Pacino's Shylock is opaque and his actions not well justified by the performance or the staging, and Jessica is a vague whimperer rather than a fully realized character, but I appreciate this version more than I did previously.
seekingferret: Two warning signs one above the other. 1) Falling Rocks. 2) Falling Rocs. (Default)
I heard belatedly about director Jonathan Munby's Merchant of Venice, with Jonathan Pryce starring as Shylock, playing a one week stint at the Lincoln Center Festival. It was originally created for the Globe Theater and is apparently now on tour. I did some looking at reviews and saw only good things, and particular notes about some additions to the text I was curious about, so I decided I wanted to see it. By the time I looked, there weren't many seats left. I was left with the choice of spending nearly a hundred dollars for seats all the way in the back, or one fifty for fourth row orchestra seats, and I decided to splurge since it seemed like a fairly small marginal increase- if I was already in for a hundred dollars, might as well make sure I got choice seats. I'm not sure I've ever spent so much money on a theatrical performance, and I instantly to a certain degree regretted it. It is not the kind of money I normally spend and to do so on a play I have such deep, complicated feelings about was a significant risk for that kind of money. Still, it was a staging I didn't really want to miss.

Munby's major question on Merchant is: How can a play so terribly racist be read as a comedy in today's age? His answer is: It shouldn't be. And yet unlike Darko Tresnjak's magnificent transformation of the play into a tragedy, into Shylock's tragedy, Munby commits fully to the text of Merchant as a comedy. Instead of working against that clear intention, he works it against the audience. The persistent question Munby poses to his audience is: "Why are you laughing? This isn't funny!"

He opens the play with an introductory masque, singing, dancing, music and drums, the revelry of a Venetian street carnival. (There is brilliant music throughout the production, with a wide range of meanings.) The actors don't just dance onstage, they dance into the aisles, egging on the audience, and then they start to clap. They clap in rhythm with the drums, the clapping spreads from actor to actor and then, with encouragement from the actors, it spreads to the audience. It built and built, filling the theater, until two Jews, Shylock and a companion, clad in red caps marking them as Jews, blundered through the carnival by mistake. The music stops. The revelers, led by Antonio, spit on and then savagely beat Shylock and his coreligionist. The very same revelers the audience was just clapping along with!!!! (I was not clapping along. The audience participation bits throughout the show did not work on me. I do not identify with the Venetians. I stand with Shylock.) Watching the Venetians beat Shylock was the first time this play made me tear up, but it was not the last. It was just so visceral, watching a Jew beaten on stage for the amusement of the Christian heroes of the play. This is not ancient history, you know. At intermission the couple behind me was reading from the program a small historical note about Elizabethan anti-semitism and snickering. One of them said to the other "It says the Elizabethans were anti-semitic. No shit!" it was such classic New York liberal superiority. I wanted to turn to them and say "21st Century Americans are anti-semitic, too! No shit!" I restrained myself.

Later, Shylock's servant Gobbo grapples with whether to steal from his master the Jew. A devil sits on one shoulder, an angel on the other. Gobbo pulls two people from the audience and brings them on stage to pantomime as the devil and the angel. He enlists the audience to take their behalfs, playing up the comic bawdiness of Gobbo and his ridiculous call and response games until half the audience is cheering for Gobbo to steal from the Jew without realizing it. (I realized it. The audience participation bits did not work on me. I stand with Shylock.)

Again and again, this was Munby's solution to the problem of the play's comic racism- to trick the audience into laughing at it and then pull the curtain back and reveal what they'd just laughed at. But I was never laughing, so I just had the uncomfortable feeling throughout of watching an audience all around me laugh at anti-semitic jokes. Jokes at my expense. It was... revealing.

Merchant is not only the anti-semitic Shakespeare play, though. It's also otherwise racist! People forget that in Morocco's scene there is Portia's infamous line about his complexion, that Aragon's scene is just a long series of ethnic jokes... Munby didn't seek to undermine these scenes at all. He played them as ethnic comedy, as they are written, and I suppose he trusted that the lesson he was teaching in the scenes about the Jews would echo into these scenes, or perhaps he thought a few jokes about savage Africans and fussy Spaniards were funny, or perhaps he just needed to beef up the comedy for his finale to land as hard as he wanted, but I wanted more from these scenes.

What of Shylock? Pryce's Shylock was good, but not great. He was a nervous creature, much abused and much suffering from the abuse, but I actually believed in the negotiation scene that when he spoke of the pound of flesh as his 'merry bond', he meant it. There was little sinister, manipulative intent, little of the chessmaster. This was a reactive Shylock. Pryce and Munby's interpretation of this scene seemed to be that after repeated insulting of Shylock by Antonio, Antonio has the temerity to actually ask a favor of Shylock, and yet even as he asks the favor, Antonio cannot disguise his hatred of Shylock. Shylock sees this, sees how in the midst of begging a favor Antonio cannot resist throwing Shylock's Chumash to the ground and calling him the devil, and sees an opportunity to turn the tables. Not to kill Antonio, but for once in his life to get to laugh at Antonio, rather than the reverse. Refusing interest, demanding a pound of flesh as bond, it is not bloodthirst but a calculated insult of Antonio's worth as a man and a merchant. Only after Jessica's betrayal is Shylock reduced to nothing but vengeance. His kinsman Tubal feeds him this vengeance as an antidote to his grief over losing his daughter: With every yet more sorrowful detail about her departure, Tubal soothes Shylock's fraying nerves by reminding him of Antonio's poor business fortunes, reminding him that at least he will gain his petty insult on the evil merchant as consolation. Except that as Shylock's worldview warps, he no longer sees it as just being an insult. He wants blood. He wants this horrible Christian society that he is trapped in to inflict punishment on Antonio by its own rules, in lieu of restoring Jessica to him.

Jessica's relationship with her father is strained but heartfelt. It is clear that growing up without her mother in the house of Shylock was not easy for her, that she is not leaving for Lorenzo entirely because she loves Lorenzo, but because she knows it will hurt her father. In their opening scene, they bicker at each other in 20th century Yiddish theater Yiddish. (I'm unclear on the historical accuracy of this. Well, okay, I'm half-unclear. I am sure that two Venetian Jews from the 15th century would not talk in 20th century Yiddish theater Yiddish, but I'm not sure if they would have spoken a German-inflected Jewish dialect, as the staging suggests, or if they would have spoken some form of Judeo-Italian, or if they as Northern Italians would have spoken some combination of the two. I just don't know enough about the historical linguistics.) Shylock is trying to impose rules on her for her own safety, but because of who he is, because of the distance between the two of them, he cannot explain himself to her, only order her around. She resents the unexplained restrictions, resents her Jewishness, her Otherness.

But kinship is not all that binds Jessica to Shylock, and it is not all that she is surrendering in joining Lorenzo. Much is made in the later Belmont scenes of Jessica's struggle to adjust to being a Christian. She doesn't know how to act, she doesn't know how to move, she doesn't know how to talk like a Christian. The second act opens with a dance sequence, in which Lorenzo gives her a crucifix necklace to wear and then tries to teach her Christian dances and she struggles and fumbles and ultimately is supplanted by her mistress Portia, who dances effortlessly with Lorenzo as Jessica looks on in frustration. Every time Portia addresses Lorenzo and Jessica, the actress emphasized a distinct pause between addressing Lorenzo and Jessica, a pause clearly intended to Other Jessica. The difference is not just about faith. In becoming a Christian she is asked to give up her culture, too, and learn a new one. I'm not sure if this was intentional, because it seems too subtle a gesture, but the first time Lorenzo gives her a glass of non-kosher wine, she holds it for a minute and then returns it to a table untouched, as if she is uncomfortable with the idea of for the first time drinking unkosher wine. She can shed her faith, but this cultural tradition of being careful about food dies hard. In her next scene we see her drinking, adjusting.

And at last we reach the finale. the much-talked about Coda which reviewers coyly mentioned as the standout feature of this production. Shylock is humbled and humiliated, his daughter's seducer Lorenzo and the hated Antonio to split his fortune, and he to be forcibly converted. When Jessica hears the news, she is brought to her knees in agony and repentance, singing in Hebrew the words of the daily Vidui confession of the Shemoneh Esrei. Pardon us, our Father, for we have sinned; forgive us, our King, for we have transgressed; for You are a good and forgiving God. Blessed are You, Hashem, gracious One who pardons abundantly. At last she feels the call of her heritage, which she has surrendered with little recompense. And then her Hebrew prayer of penitence is drowned out by Christian chanting, as Munby shows us Shylock's baptism. At last, there is no more laughter, no more comedy. The weddings and the happy endings for the Venetians are drowned out by Shylock's misery. And once more, for perhaps the fourth or fifth time, the production reduced me to tears.

Was it worth the money? I don't know. It was powerfully, effectively staged and moving. I love the context that the ending gave to the story, and am glad I got to see Munby's thoughts on the ending and on the idea of racist comedy generally. But it was painful getting that reminder of how differently I see the world than non-Jews, painful seeing all the places they laughed and I wasn't laughing. In the courtroom scene... How can you possibly laugh during the courtroom scene? They offered Shylock double his original 3,000 ducats and he hesitated for a comic moment, caught between his avarice and his wrath, and the audience laughed. The audience laughed at the idea of a Jew comically trapped between his moneylust and his bloodlust! (I didn't laugh. I stand with Shylock.) 21st Century Americans are anti-semitic, too! No shit!

I stand with Shylock, and that is sometimes a difficult thing to do, because he is a caricatured monster from a long bygone era's deepest fears. I do not stand with him because I long to hold in my hand a pound of Christian flesh, or else three thousand ducats plus interest. I stand with him because Shakespeare sometimes manages to make him look like a member of my family, and I stand with him because my family have all vowed together never to forget what it means to be a Jew.
seekingferret: Two warning signs one above the other. 1) Falling Rocks. 2) Falling Rocs. (Default)
I saw this exact same Merchant of Venice, with Darko Tresnjak directing and F. Murray Abraham as Shylock, with these costumes and these sets, in a different theater four years ago. And it was a completely different play.

Back then, AIG was an insurance company that aired Super Bowl commercials and Goldman Sachs a phenomenally successful investment bank and the show was being played in a Broadway theater for a crowd of theatergoers.

So much has changed since Spring 2007. I've graduated college, found a job, tried to figure out how to negotiate adulthood. The economy crashed, we got our first Black President, an oil company dumped millions of gallons of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. All of those external changes made this a very different show.

The opening scene, with Antonio and all of his friends dressed as Wall Street investors or bankers or lawyers, was awkward and false, as if these people knew the doom awaiting them and were trying to, well, mask it with booze and easy women and loose talk. Sound familiar? In this staging, Antonio=AIG didn't need to be said. It was understood. Portia = Goldman didn't need to be said. It was there if you were looking for it.

And the thing about this recontextualization is that it accommodates the play's racism and antisemitism and misogyny without any struggle whatsoever. The play takes place in the highest bastions of the patriarchy. Are you surprised to see these bankers and brokers sitting around in their office shooting the bull about women they've slept with, parties they've been to, pranks they've pulled? Of course not. Are you surprised that none of them are black, but most of their servants are? Of course not. (Of particular note is a fascinating casting move, making Nerissa black. When Portia utters her infamous slur about the Prince of Morocco's complexion, a light turns to Nerissa and shows her shock at the betrayal that Portia doesn't even seem to realize she's committed.) Privilege like you wouldn't believe is on display.

Antonio makes no apology at all for hating Jews. With his life on the line, he doesn't try reasoning with Shylock, just makes a resigned speech about the blackness of Shylock's heart. And it's brilliantly done because the director has shown us so well at this point that for all Shylock's evil (And make no mistake, this production does not make him anything less than a monster. Abraham's shouts in the climactic scene "I will have my bond!" are from the deepest part of his heart, one of the sincerest moments his character has.), he is desperate for the approval of these people and the right kind of appeal from Antonio probably could have worked.

One more are you surprised, because it brings out a theme of the play oft-overlooked, or at least, oft focused differently. Are you surprised that when the bankers and brokers are out for a debauched night on the town, Shylock is scared for the safety of his beautiful daughter? This is a play about sexual violence. Critics usually look at Portia, bound by her father to marry whoever wins a stupid game. But amidst his generic fear of violent antisemitic outbreaks, Shylock's fear that his daughter will be raped looms large in this staging. I see clear echoes of the story of Jacob and Dina in the Jessica plot.

Oh, that's another thing I wanted to talk about. I love that Shakespeare makes his Jew better at quoting Scripture than his Christians. Shylock's speech about Jacob and Laban is effective and reasonably accurate. Gobbo's speech about the sins of the father is theologically and scripturally garbled. But I think these two scenes are foregrounded very well here, illustrating the Biblical undertones of the story, implying the history that leads to these ancestral hatreds. The reason this play endures, the reason we still stage it despite the fact that it's so nasty and racist and easy to misstage, is that it really is an incredibly intricate and beautiful play. By keeping the notes on the caskets on screens for all of the Belmont scenes, they called attention to the way those messages "Who chooses me will get what many men desire," etc... are echoed in the Venetian storylines. From a dramatic standpoint, there is nothing whatsoever that Shakespeare got wrong in this play. It's just so deep and full of meaning.

I've said next to nothing about Shylock, probably cause that's a whole post in itself. But F. Murray Abraham is the greatest Shylock I've ever seen, still.

Profile

seekingferret: Two warning signs one above the other. 1) Falling Rocks. 2) Falling Rocs. (Default)
seekingferret

June 2025

S M T W T F S
1234567
89 1011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
2930     

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags