Seeking Ferret

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.

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.

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.

On roga's recommendation I saw the Improvised Shakespeare Company last night.

On the one hand, their shtick is comparatively simple: They take a single prompt from the audience, a title, and use it as the seed to improvise a one hour pseudo-Shakepearean play.

On the other hand, this is a really impressively complicated brief. They develop characters with unique narrative arcs and mannerisms, make puns and rhymes in mock-Elizabethan English, and tell a complete story made up on the spot.

Last night, I saw the one and only performance of "Romeo and Julie Andrews". I'd say its constituent ingredients were about thirty percent Romeo and Juliet, thirty percent Sound of Music, 20 percent Mary Poppins, 10 percent Macbeth, 10 percent assorted other Shakespeare and Julie Andrews jokes. A roving gang chimney sweeps (and one bellringer) plotted ineffectual revenge on the son of King Andrews of Scotland. King Andrews's daughter Julie, newly returned from the convent and overflowing with hormones (In one of the best lines of the night, she declares that she is thirteen-going-on-fourteen), is to be married to a mysterious foreign prince until she elopes with MacRomeo. MacRomeo and Julie Andrews are wed by a trio of woodland sprites that are a little bit Weird Sisters, a little bit Ariel and Caliban and Puck, and a little bit Von Trapp. The wedding ceremony was a punny invocation of the complete cycle of "Do, a Deer". The whole thing was amazing.

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.