Theatre in Review: The Merchant of Venice (Arlekin Players at Classic Stage Company)

	Richard Topol and Jose Espinosa. Photo: Pavel Antonov

Often cited as one of William Shakespeare's "problem plays," The Merchant of Venice is in fact a remarkably supple piece. It can absorb a multitude of interpretations, which is perhaps one reason it gets done so often despite the obvious problem of antisemitism. Indeed, the Jewish money lender Shylock can be played in so many ways that sometimes I wonder if we understand what Shakespeare was up to. Dustin Hoffman's Shylock was devastated by grief over his daughter, Jessica, running off with a Christian lover. Ron Leibman was a furious operator, doing his best to secure justice in a world filled with welshers and double-dealers. Al Pacino created a soul warped by a lifetime spent as an object of loathing clutching to the only form of justice he understood. Taking the opposite tack, John Douglas Thompson made Shylock a suave, confident businessman driven mad by a society that casually mocks and wounds him.

Similarly, the relationship between Antonio, the title character, and his friend Bassanio has been portrayed as Platonic or sexually charged, either unrequited on Antonio's part or a youthful fling from which Bassanio has moved on. (Bassanio's need for money to woo Portia, you will remember, sets the plot in motion. Antonio gets the necessary ducats from Shylock, using his ships and their goods as collateral. When the ships are destroyed, and Antonio can't honor the debt, Shylock comes for his pound of flesh.) Also, Portia can be played as a feminist adventurer or a cynical observer of men: One of the most striking aspects of the Pacino production was Portia's (Lily Rabe) slowly dawning realization that Antonio (David Harbour) was quite possibly a lightweight unworthy of her love. With The Merchant of Venice, it seems, the possibilities are endless.

Then there's Igor Golyak's production, which buries the play under so many gimmicks as to render it incoherent. This is The Merchant of Venice, sort of, with huge chunks of text removed, often replaced with new dialogue, most of it puerile. The play is initially reframed as an episode of The Antonio Show, with T.R. Knight, dressed like a talk-show host, telling lousy jokes -- "I tell ya, things have gone from Bard to verse!" -- while characters like Bassanio take the guest couch. This framing device is also meant to be a play-within-the-play: We have already been advised that several actors and crew members have walked just before showtime, and the remaining company members are resolved to forge ahead as best they can. Got it? No? Don't worry; the conceit is quickly dropped, possibly because someone realized it is unworkable.

Based on the play's traditional classification as a comedy, Golyak and his team pack it with more unfunny bits than one might think possible. They range from clumsy to silly to offensive: When, after all sorts of fooling around, the production gets around to the play proper, the first scene is performed by Knight, as Antonio, and two hand puppets representing the minor characters Salarino and Solanio. Knight uses screechy cartoon voices for their lines, rendering the exposition intelligible. Shylock appears in Groucho glasses, occasionally sporting vampire fangs. The clown Launcelot Gobbo comes and goes on a unicycle, apparently crashing offstage several times. Lorenzo, Jessica's lover, and his friends appear in Batman masks, introduced by Lalo Schifrin's Mission: Impossible theme. When they show up at Shylock's house to carry off Jessica, instead of tossing them a casket of money she drops a shoe, which each of them sniffs in turn. Someone passes through in a blow-up unicorn suit, with a mane of Pride colors, only to be told that their scene has been cut.

Meanwhile, at Belmont, Portia's estate, the contest for her hand, involving several princes and caskets of gold, lead, and silver, has heavily edited and reimagined a bachelorette party. Portia and Nerissa, her companion, watch TV, flipping the dials between screenings of Miracle on 34th Street, White Christmas, The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, and It's a Wonderful Life, squealing at each new entry. Tubal, Shylock's Jewish friend, shows up in a grotesque beard, singing "Hava Nagila." The trial scene features Portia dressed as Batman -- what is it about Batman, anyway? -- and Nerissa as Robin; it features opening music from Law and Order.

What's especially frustrating is that Richard Topol, an excellent actor, is surely capable of giving us a memorable Shylock, and Alexandra Silber would, under different conditions, make a probing, intelligent Portia. Even here they have tiny moments that allows one to see what they might have done. The sight of Shylock standing over Jessica, humming a lullaby, heartbreakingly shadows the breach to come. Topol's straight-up rendering of the "Hath not a Jew eyes?" speech reveals the foundation for a solid characterization. Silber's urgent, almost terrified rendering of "The quality of mercy," here a desperate attempt at preventing Shylock from carving up Antonio, is strikingly original. Oddly, most of Portia's legalistic argument against Shylock's case has been removed in the interest of making Shylock the victim of a corrupt judicial process.

I guess that Golyak, in trying to confront the play's embedded prejudice, has decided that shock tactics are the way to go. But such an approach doesn't work if it renders the play incoherent. And other directors have addressed the issue without resorting to overbearing, audience-punishing measures. (This is the incredible shrinking Merchant, by the way; before attending, members of the press were told the show ran two hours and fifty minutes. The performance I attended was twenty minutes shorter. Since then, the intermission has been eliminated and the running time is two hours. I see this as progress.)

Worst of all, the finale, in which Shylock, seen behind plastic sheeting, is apparently gassed, is a shockingly manipulative evocation of the Holocaust. That Golyak and the rest of his Arlekin Players team should go from Our Class, a stunning drama about Polish antisemitism over the last century (seen last season at BAM and a few weeks ago at CSC), to this sort of grim exploitation is deeply disheartening.

The supporting cast, most of them seen in Our Class, clearly delivers what the director wants. (They include Gus Birney as Jessica, Tess Goldwyn as Nerissa, Jose Espinosa as Bassanio, Stephen Ochsner as Launcelot, and Noah Pacht as Lorenzo.) Similarly, Jan Pappelbaum (scenery), Seth Reiser (lighting), Sasha Ageeva (costumes), and Fedor Zhuravlev (sound) have collaborated to create the madhouse atmosphere that prevails. But this isn't so much a production of The Merchant of Venice as an assault on it, feverishly dedicated to exposing an antisemitism that is plainly evident and has been dealt with better in other productions. The set features several "applause" signs that get deployed from time to time; at the performance I attended, the audience largely declined to play along. --David Barbour