Merchant of Venice, yet again
Dec. 2nd, 2024 09:42 amThe 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.
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.