Watching the Theatre for a New Audience’s production of The Merchant of Venice (I saw it in New York; it’s now on tour, currently in Boston, then headed to Los Angeles), which is set vaguely on Wall Street, I kept wondering how to square the sociology on display with what I know about actual reality. Wall Street, after all, hasn’t been an old-line WASP preserve for at least a generation. Today, you’re as likely to see a Jewish (or, for that matter, a South Asian) executive at the helm as someone whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower; Goldman Sachs, once a firm for Jewish upstarts, is now at the epicenter of financial (and political) power. The place of the Jews in Shakespeare’s Venice is complicated, but they are clearly outsiders – their role in trade is important enough that the Duke does not feel free simply to set aside Shylock’s bond and impose a settlement, but they are vulnerable enough that even the likes of Gratiano can spit upon them on the Rialto with impunity; they are a necessary but disreputable element in the constitution of the Venetian republic. What does this have to do with our society today?

It’s a problem, because one always wants to bring Shakespeare home, to have it speak to us, across the generations. Merchant is, among other things, a great play about money and finance, and those would seem to be topics of particularly keen interest at this moment. (It’s no accident that this season, so soon after the financial meltdown, saw two celebrated productions of this play – my review of the Pacino production, in its Central Park incarnation, can be found here.) But it’s also a play about insiders and outsiders, and a play about Jews and Christians. And quite apart from the fact that the theological anti-Semitism assumed by Shakespeare is (thankfully) no longer generally acceptable, at least not on the American stage, the fact is that Shylock’s position simply is not analogous to the position of Jews in America, and certainly not in the world of American finance. It is a generally acknowledged difficulty with the play that the fairytale comedy of Portia’s wooing jars when placed alongside the “tragedy” of Shylock. I happen to think that this “difficulty” is one of the major sources of interest, but be that as it may, I suspect a greater difficulty is that we cannot turn the play into an indictment of our own society without seriously misrepresenting what our society is.

Daniel Sullivan set his production in a vaguely-specified past some time around the turn of the last century. This allowed the social position of Shylock to make sense, but the vagueness with which the past was specified – some of the clothing was considerably more modern than period – allowed us more easily to enter into the world of the Venetian Christians, and to see the indictment being leveled against their materialistic and hypocritical values as relevant to our own. It would have been easy, in the context of such a production, to make Shylock into a tragic victim of social prejudice, and it is enormously to the credit of Sullivan and Pacino that they did not do this, that they let him be an individual and, indeed, a villain, while shielding themselves from the charge of perpetrating an anti-Semitic production by making more peripheral Jewish characters, such as Tubal, into “good” Jews.

Darko Tresnjak goes a different route. His play is set plainly in a version of now – Apple-brand laptops, trading screens, cell phones, contemporary suits. And F. Murray Abraham’s Shylock is both a familiar victim-figure, a man hardened by abuse who finally breaks from the loss of his daughter, and a familiar civilized and pious Jew. And so I found myself continually distracted by my sociological question: is this supposed us? It looks like it’s supposed to be us. But we don’t treat Orthodox Jews this way. So where are we? And who is that man Shylock supposed to be?

I never did figure that out, but eventually I stopped worrying about it (and, as a consequence, stopped thinking about our society – so the setting didn’t “work” for me in that sense). And, once I stopped worrying, the production certainly had its pleasures. Abraham gives a sensitive and nuanced performance in a vein that I am not generally partial toward – namely, the noble Shylock, victim of antisemitism. His best choice in the play is his reading of the “let him look to his bond” line, immediately before Shylock’s most famous peroration (“Hath not a Jew eyes?”):

There I have another bad match: a bankrupt, a
prodigal, who dare scarce show his head on the
Rialto; a beggar, that was used to come so smug upon
the mart; let him look to his bond: he was wont to
call me usurer; let him look to his bond: he was
wont to lend money for a Christian courtesy; let him
look to his bond.

As Abraham played it, this is the moment that Shylock decides upon revenge. He had not, to this point, planned to kill Antonio, had not planned to demand his pound of flesh. But now, taunted by Salanio and Salarino over the loss of his daughter, he realizes just what his bond is worth. It’s not merely a way of catching Antonio “upon the hip” as he put it when he makes the bond (he means, presumably, the leverage to force him permanently out of business) but an opportunity to exact his revenge upon all Christians in the person of Antonio. Abraham pauses to figure this out, right before the first “let him look to his bond.” It’s a very fine, subtle bit of acting.

Apart from Abraham, the most notable performances were the comic ones – by Jacob Ming-Trent as a corpulent Launcelot Gobbo, and Grant Goodman playing Bassanio’s wingman Solanio as a tipsy and disheveled floor trader (a guy I know all too well from my Wall Street days). Ming-Trent got heartier laughs than Gobbo usually does for his antisemitic jokes, and I did find myself wondering whether the audience was more comfortable laughing because the jester was an African-American. I’m not sure – but I suspect so, and I rather suspect Mr. Tresnjak thought of that in the casting. If so, good for him for having that insight.

The other major players were less distinct, to me. Tom Nelis begins the play by replying that he doesn’t know why he’s sad – but nobody is on the stage with him, so who is he conversing with? His Antonio doesn’t come completely into focus for me until the trial scene, when the sexual dimension to his love for Bassanio can no longer be debated. Lucas Hall makes a plausible Bassanio, and I think it’s fine for him to show far more passion for Antonio than he does for Portia, but we never get much of a clue about what she sees in him. And there’s the real hole in the production: a relatively light Portia. I admit, I come bearing certain prejudices: the Portia of my mind’s eye is a decidedly intimidating figure, who selects Bassanio (and she plainly does select him) precisely because she sees he will be easy to control. But I am open to other interpretations, and Lily Rabe offered an exceptionally strong version of a Portia who is genuinely enraptured with Bassanio, and genuinely crushed when he betrays her. Kate MacCluggage, in this production, seems very much the spoiled little rich girl, which is fine, and to have something of a girlish crush on Bassanio, which is also fine, but then where does Balthasar come from?

I was generally puzzled by the way MacCluggage played the trial scene. Her Portia appears to have come in without a clear plan how to save Antonio, but more than that, when she traps Shylock she seems to only realize as she traps him that this is what she is doing. She quotes the law at him, with increasing force and vehemence, but then shows anguish as the law takes its course. I’m really not sure what she was aiming for with this; I suspect she was aiming for remorse, but it comes too quickly for that, and lacks the complexity of recognition of her own responsibility. Her strongest moment, actually, was her reaction to Antonio and Bassanio’s passionate kiss at the trial. I felt that she knew, in that moment, that Bassanio’s physical passion for her – perhaps, even, her physical passion for him – was never going to match what these two men felt for each other. After this, the thing with the ring was just stage business – she already knew the answer, only wanted a prop to prove to him she knew.

But I don’t mean to be negative. This is a solid production directed with a clear overall vision. And I certainly learned new things about this elusive and infuriating play, as I always do. One day I will finally lay out (possibly in this space!) all the details of the Merchant of my mind’s eye. No doubt, once I have a clear view of the beam that lies in it, I’ll have more compassion for the motes in other productions.