{"id":2965,"date":"2012-02-20T22:03:00","date_gmt":"2012-02-21T03:03:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=2965"},"modified":"2012-03-19T23:37:53","modified_gmt":"2012-03-20T03:37:53","slug":"strong-portia-and-shylock-redeem-confused-merchant-at-csc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=2965","title":{"rendered":"Strong Portia and Shylock Redeem Confused MERCHANT at CSC"},"content":{"rendered":"

Theater Reviews Page<\/a> | Previous Theater Review<\/a> | Next Theater Review<\/a><\/p>\n

Strong Portia and Shylock Redeem Confused MERCHANT at CSC<\/h2>\n
\"\"<\/a>

Heather Howard and Greg Burgess in Merchant of Venice<\/p><\/div>\n

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com<\/a> February 20, 2012<\/p>\n

At the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company\u2019s revival of The Merchant of Venice<\/em>, great efforts are made to render the performance \u201caccessible.\u201d Before the action starts, actors lounge around the hall, interacting with the audience. As the action starts, there is no dimming of house lights, and in fact there is very little house\/stage distinction at all, given that the \u201cstage\u201d is simply a relatively small part of the room in which the audience sits on either side (augmented occasionally by a loft at one end of the room), and the actors are continually making exits and entrances not merely through the audience area but in between rows of patrons \u2013 again and again and again.\u00a0 I was forced to wonder whether all this accessibility was really a service to the audience or the play.<\/p>\n

An Inacessible World<\/h3>\n

I say this because The Merchant of Venice<\/em> is not, despite its popularity, one of Shakespeare\u2019s more approachable plays.\u00a0 It is not a story of people somehow like us behaving in ways that can be totally explained using modern frames of reference. In order to respond as Shakespeare evidently intended, we would have to accept that there was some kind of rightness in the marginalization and persecution of Jews and the privileging of Christianity in a civilized society. In this play, Shakespeare has crafted what critic Harold Bloom rightly terms an \u201canti-Semitic masterpiece.\u201d<\/a> A modern audience should marvel at the mastery in this master-piece, but there is no acceptable way to get comfortable or cozy with it. A performance is not, and should not be presented as, a bunch of just-folks actors enacting a tale of just-folks having just-folks problems.<\/p>\n

Instead, we are being plunged into a cauldron of contradictions that have their roots in a Renaissance world with violently different moral sensibilities from our own.\u00a0 Antonio, the merchant of the title (Scott Alan Small), is admirable; we know this because of his bold mercantile enterprises, and even more because of his overwhelming generosity to Bassanio, his prot\u00e9g\u00e9, literally placing his life on the line to further Bassanio\u2019s marital agenda. Antonio is also despicable, however, spitting on Shylock\u2019s clothes, insulting his profession of money-lending, calling him a \u201cmisbeliever\u201d and a \u201ccutthroat dog,\u201d muttering animadversions on Shylock\u2019s \u201cJewish heart.\u201d Bassanio (Matthew Sparacino) is admirable in his willingness to risk much to win the hand of Portia, in his love for Portia when he wins her, and in his loyalty to Antonio. Bassanio is also part of the gang that (without any excuse or sense that any excuse is needed) steals Shylock\u2019s money along with his daughter. Portia (Heather Howard) is admirable in her conformity to her father\u2019s mortmain<\/em> control of her marital destiny, in her love for Bassanio, and for her miraculous judicial skills. But she is able to use those skills to turn Antonio\u2019s defeat into victory only by gleefully relying on Venice\u2019s xenophobic laws under which, so incidentally as not even to require comment, a Jew cannot attain the status of citizen. Shylock (Greg Burgess) is not<\/em> admirable: he plots against Antonio\u2019s life, and tries to subvert Venice\u2019s rule of law by persuading a court to sanction killing as a mere incident of surety enforcement. Yet it is Shylock, and only he, who feelingly questions and suffers under a social and legal regime that promotes and fully accepts the dehumanization and degradation of a religious minority.<\/p>\n

In stormy fictive seas like these, a modern audience ought not merely to feel as if it cannot find a firm bottom to stand upon; it should feel itself miles from land. It is therefore just wrong to surround a performance of the play with trappings of folksy accessibility. Instead, the audience should feel as if it is being inducted into something both wonderful and horrible \u2013 but in any case, into what Monty Python dubbed \u201csomething completely different.\u201d<\/p>\n

Two Towering Roles<\/h3>\n

Get past directorial choices, however, and this is a pretty good staging. This production one should go to for the acting. There are two towering roles in the play: Portia and Shylock (I have never been convinced that the Merchant of the title, Antonio, deserves to have the play named for him).\u00a0 Howard\u2019s portrayal of Portia is magnificent. She is passionate as both ingenue and jurist, conveying well her character\u2019s love for Bassanio, while at the same time making credible the one moment she is really hard on him, even if only in sport (twitting him for losing a ring she gave him, knowing all the while the ring is not lost). My only quarrel with Howard\u2019s performance (and again this goes back to directorial choices), is that no credible effort was expended in making her look masculine or different enough from her character\u2019s ordinary self so that anyone in the court could have been deceived for a moment as to her gender, or that Bassanio and his colleague Graziano could have been successfully misled as to her identity. And yes, yes, I know that total verisimilitude could hardly have been required either way in Shakespeare\u2019s time either. In fact then, because all the female parts were played by men, the gender problem would have gone the other way, i.e. rendering dramatically plausible the performance of femaleness, not maleness. But my point is that it\u2019s hard to conceive of Bassanio, smitten as he is by Portia, being fooled for a moment by the imposture. And if you think that Shakespeare did not aim for any level of plausibility in this fantasy tale, think again: just think how believably close Shylock seems to come to realizing his aspiration to obtain judicial sanction for murder, at least an equally not-gonna-happen thing as a lay woman convincing a courtroom she is male and a judge. Just as Shylock\u2019s plausible closeness to success matters dramatically, so too a semi-plausible drag would have helped here. And Howard, I believe, could have pulled it off.<\/p>\n

Burgess is even more impressive as Shylock. He scales the heights and plumbs the depths with the character \u2013 and Shakespeare has provided him with plenty of both. Obviously the fact that Burgess is African American in an nearly all-white cast made for certain resonances. This is unconventional casting that works well. Because both Jews and blacks have been treated as Others in similar ways, we in the audience bring similar preconceptions to performances of blackness as to performances of Yiddishkeit. Burgess wisely does not attempt to load the character down with a Yiddish accent which in itself is naturally conducive to histrionics (as I have seen done), but otherwise gives full vent to histrionic highs and lows Shakespeare has given the character. Critics have commented that even at his most feverish, and even at the moment of his greatest humiliation when he is forced to convert to Christianity, Shylock maintains a weird dignity, and Burgess conveys this.<\/p>\n

I cannot speak as approvingly of the unconventional casting of Launcelot Gobbo, played by a female actor, Kelsey Painter. But I acknowledge that the role is a mess in any actor or director\u2019s hands. Exactly what kind of joke Shakespeare was making with this serving-man who deserts Shylock\u2019s employ is hard to tell; the language is so obscure and wild it gives us few cues. Even harking back to the original staging tells us little.\u00a0 The play was probably first produced at earliest in 1599, just after Will Kempe, Shakespeare\u2019s original clown, who had premiered the role of Falstaff, for instance, left the Lord Chamberlain\u2019s Men, and so far as I am aware, we do not even know the first Launcelot\u2019s name, let alone his persona. In this production, Launcelot is portrayed as some kind of zany, with crazy hair and makeup, perpetually pulling up drooping short pants. Not for a moment could one conceive of Launcelot as a male character, let alone a coherent one.<\/p>\n

A Night at Belmont<\/h3>\n

Having spoken at some length of directorial choices I would not praise, let me mention one area where I think director Teresa Castracane nailed it: the portrayal of the love of Lorenzo (Vince Eisenson) and Jessica (Molly Moores), and in particular the starlit night they spend basking in each other\u2019s love at Portia\u2019s home in Belmont, awaiting the happy return of the other lovers, at the beginning of Act V, Scene 1. Castracane finally kills the horrible house lights to achieve a modestly dazzling light effect, and for a moment we are in a place of sublime safety and happiness, thanks to these two passionate young lovers.<\/p>\n

While I have gone on at some length on this production\u2019s flaws, then, I do wish to hark back to my fundamental impression, which is that the strong Portia and strong Shylock outweigh the miscues in other areas. In a play in which morally acceptable and unacceptable stances are hopelessly intertwined and might turn an audience off, there are two things that will draw us to the play anyway: these two characters. If they are right, the play will succeed, despite all its difficulties. They are right as can be in this staging.<\/p>\n

Copyright Jack L. B. Gohn except for photograph, by Teresa Castracane<\/p>\n

Theater Reviews Page<\/a> | Previous Theater Review<\/a> | Next Theater Review<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a play in which morally acceptable and unacceptable stances are hopelessly intertwined and might turn an audience off, there are two things that will draw us to the play anyway: these two characters, Portia and Shylock. If they are right, the play will succeed, despite all its difficulties. They are right as can be in this staging.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,3098],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2965","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-closeup","category-theater-reviews-and-commentary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2965","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2965"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2965\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3018,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2965\/revisions\/3018"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2965"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2965"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2965"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}