theater review

A Frustrating Merchant of Venice With a Shylock to Remember

From The Merchant of Venice, at Theater for a New Audience. Photo: Gerry Goodstein/(c)2021 Gerry Goodstein

The merchant in The Merchant of Venice has it tough. He cares nearly a jerk who keeps borrowing money. He's lost more argosies than yous've had hot dinners. And worst of all — no one remembers that he is not Shylock. The actual merchant in Shakespeare's play is the melancholy Antonio, who survives Shylock'southward plot to extract a pound of flesh for a loan gone bad. Yet our loyalties take slewed around so completely in the last 400 years that we now think the play (fifty-fifty its championship!) belongs to the human who is, dramaturgically speaking, but the villain.

Absolutely, the not-Shylock parts of Merchant are hardly Shakespeare's best. Antonio's friend Bassanio and the wealthy Portia are stuck in a past-the-numbers comic romance plot in which Portia's suitors need to choose among three metallic chests. It's all a bit silly. Simply then Bassanio's friend Lorenzo elopes with Shylock's daughter, Jessica, and the moneylender, afterwards a lifetime of insults, breaks bad. The play's pale body flushes with blood. "Hath not a Jew optics?" Shylock asks when someone begs him to end gunning for Antonio. "If y'all wrong usa, shall we not revenge?" That speech — one of the treasures hidden in the play'due south lead casket — saves the play, time and again, from history's total censure.

The modern-apparel production now at Brooklyn'southward Theater for a New Audience certainly contains up-to-the-infinitesimal disapproval for all the ways that Shakespeare fails u.s.a.. To correct for its wrong-thinking, director Arin Arbus's staging arranges itself every bit a pedestal for John Douglas Thompson'due south superb Shylock, a choice that winds up hurting the other parts of the evidence. The Merchant of Venice is, yeah, unbalanced, simply instead of correcting for this unsteadiness, Arbus leans into it. Shylock is the play'southward best grapheme. Only this production treats Shylock as its tragic hero, changing footstep, emphasis, and attitude to convert the script from one genre to another. The one-act evaporates — though the "comic" scenes, now slowed and painful, remain. Every time Shylock is offstage, the production'south clockwork winds downward; every time he enters, he has to crank the mechanism up again.

But no lightness could thrive in this surround anyway. Riccardo Hernandez's severe unit set is monumental — a set up of wide gray stairs, rise to a tall concrete wall, pierced past an oculus. (This black hole sometimes functions as a nighttime moon, sometimes as a window.) Information technology looks similar a slab of Rome's EUR district, or a Brutalist building's side entrance. Private events happen in this impersonal space, and public stuff, as well, with people standing awkwardly on higher and lower steps, shouting across the distance. Every fourth dimension it feels like we're in the incorrect identify for something to exist happening: When Lorenzo (David Lee Huynh) and Jessica (Danaya Esperanza) canoodle there barefoot, you think, Ick, that plaza isn't clean. When the courtroom scene begins, yous wonder, Why are they in the lobby? Hernandez's point is that state compages is hostile and anti-homo. But when it comes to the actual playing of scenes … well. Arbus arranges conversational groups equally if she'due south still adhering to a six-pes social-distancing rule.

Something else gums upward the residuum of the works — is it revulsion? If anyone is creepy, Arbus shines a light on the creeping so we can all disapprove together. (Of form, everyone is creepy.) She has costume designer Emily Rebholz dress Antonio's sleazoid friend Gratiano (Haynes Thigpen) in a pinkish shirt and prep-school necktie, which makes him seem particularly son-of-Trumpian. Portia (Isabel Arraiza) complains that she doesn't want to ally the Prince of Morocco (Maurice Jones) because of his "complexion," and her Black assistant Nerissa (Shirine Babb) registers the slur and gives her the stink-heart. Choices like these, though, brand subsequent scenes hard to play. Why isn't this obscene version of Gratiano cold-shouldered by any of his friends? And this Nerissa would definitely ditch her racist boss. Here Antonio (Alfredo Narciso) loves Bassanio (Sanjit De Silva) in a way that is breaking both their hearts, but over again, there's no reason for such modern men to deny themselves their passion. The production spotlights existing character flaws and, by making them contemporary, creates new ones. They go a pack of cowards, bigots, and failsons.

And so into this nest of snakes comes Shylock. The bluff, genial Thompson tends to reel when he walks, like a cowboy who's just gotten off his horse. He radiates good nature — his many fine classical performances have included right-hand-men like Kent (in Male monarch Lear) and Enobarbus (in Antony and Cleopatra). You see a glimpse of that warm, reliable Thompson when he reaches out to milk shake Antonio'southward mitt. This warmth makes it doubly awful when he is rebuffed. Thompson deflates and shrinks back, folding himself upwards, trying to disappear fifty-fifty at center phase. This disappearing-in-plain-sight fifty-fifty extends to the way he speaks: Over the years, Thompson's beautiful sawmill rasp has been abraded almost to a whisper. Equally Shylock, he storms, he weeps, he staggers, he rages … and every fourth dimension, you hear the effort information technology takes for his vocalisation to recover. The centuries take been hard on Shakespeare'south play; fourth dimension has blown the sand away to prove united states the armature underneath. Thompson'due south exhausted operation shows us all of that: the centuries, the sand, the skeleton. He cannot carry the whole evening on his back. No human could. He comes shut, though, by shouting his Shylock into the air current, by playing him, his voice scratched raw, equally if he's been playing him forever.

The Merchant of Venice is at Theater for a New Audition through March 6.

A Frustrating Merchant of Venice With a Shylock to Call up