Is The Merchant of Venice now a tool of the Israel lobby?

Shylock prepares to take his pound of flesh in Habima's Merchant of Venice.

That's the intriguing question that Boston's own Ian Thal raises (I think unconsciously) in a post on the new Clyde Fitch Report, in which he details the recent protests in London over a production of The Merchant of Venice (in Hebrew) by Habima, Israel's national theatre, at the ongoing "Globe to Globe Festival." (From the photo above, btw, the production looks to have been a bravely complex and gripping affair, with a shockingly dark view of Shylock.)

Various British theatrical eminences (including Mark Rylance and Emma Thompson) signed letters deploring Habima's appearances at the festival, and due to threats and fears of violence, high security was required at the performances - but protest still found its way into the theatre, as Ian details:

Though the most vocal protestors were kept out, Habima’s performances were repeatedly disrupted by anti-Israeli activists, who were photographed waving Palestinian flags, and unfurling banners with anti-Israeli slogans, only to be escorted out by security. Reports describe a group standing silently with their mouths covered by either tape or adhesive bandages apparently in protest of the “censorship” of the more disruptive activists. Several sources [reported] that during the trial scene in Act IV, a protester shouted “hath not a Palestinian eyes?”echoing signs seen outside the theatre as well as demonstrating a lack of knowledge of the original text (Shylock’s famous “Hath not a Jew eyes…” speech is from Act III, Scene 3.)

Now Ian - a reader and frequent commenter on the Hub Review - is, I think you could say, a staunch supporter of Israel.  My own view of Israel is more complicated only in regards to its treatment of the Palestinians - many of whom, I know, are bent on Israel's destruction, but whose rights to a viable state are nonetheless not so easily ignored.


So to Ian, the ruckus in Britain over Habima's appearance was pure "hooliganism," and evidence of a rising tide of anti-Semitism there (and elsewhere in the world).  This claim is not easily refuted (not that I'm going to try); undoubtedly legitimate Palestinian claims have long served, and perhaps will forever serve, as a cover for unreasoning hatred of Jews and the Jewish state.  An awareness of that issue is essential to any understanding of our current situation, and complicates everything else I have to say.

But still a sense of this latest, extremely ironic twist in the fraught history of The Merchant of Venice haunts me somehow.  Could this reifying document of the oppression of the Jews really be converted into a tool for the oppression of the Palestinians?  It's an argument allied to the controversial theme of Caryl Churchill's "Seven Jewish Children" (which Ian has also denounced as a "blood libel"), which posits that awareness of the Holocaust has unconsciously served as a justification for Israel's inhumanity to the oppressed Arabs under its control (and who, if granted full citizenship, would quickly render Israel's Jews a minority in their own homeland).

Christian revelers attack Shylock in Habima's Merchant of Venice.

There are few issues more controversial than these - and it's striking that Shakespeare, some four hundred years on, should still be operative in this political crucible in a way that no living American playwright is (even though American power is utterly bound up with Israeli policy). It's also, I think, somewhat curious that we should have seen so many recent productions of Merchant - all of them emphasizing Shylock's victimization and our complicity in it - at a time when Israel's moral standing, and its political and military aggressiveness, are becoming more and more controversial.  Has The Merchant of Venice, which once served as cultural cover for the likes of the Vatican, Henry Ford, and other anti-Semitic potentates, now been subtly reverse-co-opted by the Israel lobby, and its apologists in the academy and press?  This is the case that at least some protestors in London have made - that Shakespeare's portrait of Jewish powerlessness is no longer an appropriate artistic response to political reality in the Middle East - and it, too, is not so easily refuted.

And how will the future production history of Merchant accommodate this bizarre new turn in its political meaning?  How many more re-interpretations can this play bear?   I've really no idea; so what can I say but, "Stay tuned!"?

The Merchant of Venice at Trinity Rep

Another year, another production of The Merchant of Venice! After mountings at the Actors' Shakespeare Project, and ArtsEmerson, now Trinity Rep has decided to have a go at what I suppose counts as Shakespeare's most "controversial" comedy.  Sigh.  I know I shouldn't complain - but even a bardolator like me could be forgiven, I think, for half-hoping some other Shakespeare play might get half the attention from our local theatres that The Merchant of Venice does.

But then no other Shakespeare comedy can boast the same level of something that's irresistible to the our theatrical mindset these days.  I'm talking, of course, about anti-Semitism.  The Merchant of Venice reeks of it, and theatre people just can't get enough; they eat up the stuff like it's cotton candy, perhaps because nothing's sweeter than analyzing other people's bigotry.  By now I think I've seen poor Shylock's yarmulke torn off just about every way possible; I've seen the him kicked, shoved, knocked to the ground, and (of course!) spat upon.  I've watched him crawl across the stage on all fours; I've seen his soul destroyed over and over again, as evil Christians snickered at his suffering.  It used to be that theatres trimmed this play of its bigoted content; these days, we revel in it.

But needless to say, anti-Semitism has probably survived all these object demonstrations of its horrors; let's be honest, it survived the Holocaust, didn't it.  So I'm pretty sure it's still out there, biding its time, like every other prejudice.  Indeed, these earnest, guiltily-enacted depictions of bigotry may make everyone feel very virtuous, but I'm never sure what social effect they actually have.  Did Atticus Finch ever persuade a racist to mend his or her ways?

I could be wrong, but somehow I don't think so.  Nor am I entirely persuaded that art is best defined as a form of moral pedagogy (as our professors like to tell us). It seems more likely (to me) that these kinds of productions may lull the modern audience into an insidious form of moral self-satisfaction; disapproving of The Merchant of Venice allows us to imagine that our own society is free of unjust and ugly social codes.  When of course it's not (indeed, far from it).  If a "deconstruction" of the oppression embedded in The Merchant of Venice ever startled a modern-day audience member into self-awareness, if any one of them ever gazed down at his or her i-Phone and suddenly realized "Wait a minute - I can't use this; it was built by slaves!," then I might be persuaded.  But so far as I've seen, "critical thinking" rarely leads to moral awakening; indeed, it usually only ends in pointing the finger at somebody else.

Still, what are we to do with The Merchant of Venice?  It is the play that defeats every approach taken to it, as it embodies both the best and worst of our civilization.  And it's one of the plays that clearly reveals what is so unique about Shakespeare: you may be horrified at the prejudices the Bard stoops to satisfy (and I don't blame you), but you must perforce be stunned by the way he simultaneously undermines and reverses everything which appears superficially true about his play.  I think by now the silly canard that Shakespeare was personally anti-Semitic has finally lost its force; but I'm not sure a far more startling fact - that it took centuries for The Merchant of Venice to truly unfold before us, as both an ur-text of anti-Semitism, and a starting point for its negation - to truly sink in.  To be honest, I can't recall any other artist, in any form, with a work like this in his or her canon (and Shakespeare has more than one): a work that over time has seemed to negate its own original intent, while retaining - perhaps even augmenting - its sense of greatness.  I can't think of anyone but Shakespeare who has managed that.  And let's be honest about what it means to "deconstruct" The Merchant of Venice - it only means drawing out the self-critique that is already embedded in the play.  To put it bluntly, Shakespeare was "deconstructing" himself more than three hundred years before Lévi-Strauss or Foucault or Derrida were even born.

One stereotype meets another?  Stephen Berenseon's Shylock greets Joe Wilson, Jr.'s Antonio.

The same nearly-terrifying powers of insight extend from Shakespeare's treatment of anti-Semitism to inform his entire play, of course.  So while I applaud our modern deconstructions of the script's noxious surface - and of course all ritual denunciations of racism, sexism, and the rest - I'd clap even louder if I felt all of The Merchant of Venice received as thoughtful an artistic treatment as its anti-Semitic passages do.  For what seems to me most pertinent about the play now is not its treatment of Shylock, but rather its treatment of money, and the way love is so often bound up with it, consciously and unconsciously.  We forget, in fact, that this relationship is the actual theme of the text - even though the Bard lays it out baldly in his title (if with a wink we read into "Venice" everything it symbolizes).  And if anti-Semitism has been "defeated," at least among the chattering classes, rest assured the corrupting allure of money has not; indeed, we're now half-convinced that a purely mercantile, libertarian society can cure us of every prejudicial ill.  But I don't think the Bard would agree.  No, The Merchant of Venice, which is set, after all, in one of the first outposts of capitalism, tells it like it is: cosmopolitanism doesn't save Shylock; the free market always casts a blind eye on bigotry, and indeed often finds a way to profit from it.

Well, I'm afraid that was rather a long preamble to a review of what I thought was a disappointing production, and an unfortunate misstep in what has been a very strong year for Trinity in general. Director Curt Columbus clearly had it in mind to extend into his spring season the concern with prejudice that informed the best of Trinity's work last fall (which featured His Girl Friday and Clybourne Park).  And indeed, at times you can almost feel him groping for a "shocking" new angle on anti-Semitism; but there aren't many new angles on that, are there, and the complexity of the surrounding play, and the strange way in which anti-Semitism is embedded within that play, seem to defeat him somehow - perhaps because his stylistic flourishes feel thin against the text he imagines he's criticizing; you get the impression that in intellectual terms, he doesn't fully understand yet what he's up against.  It doesn't help that he mixes and matches styles and modes (Are we in the 30's? the Renaissance? Or just Central Park?) and is reduced at times to dumb shows and rather garish stage pictures to put his points across - I often felt, as I did with Melia Bensussen's Twelfth Night last winter, that I was watching the director diagram the play rather than direct it.

And it's always a bad sign, frankly, when a director feels he must cut some of a play's greatest speeches, as Columbus does here (Lorenzo's meditation on music, one of the joys of the entire canon, has gone missing, along with Old Gobbo's scene, the moving text of Antonio's letter to Bassanio, and I'm sure other worthy bits that I've forgotten).  Columbus does cleverly re-arrange the Tubal scene to yield a dramatic black-out to close the first act; but it's his one successful gambit after about a dozen failed ones.

Drawing a blank: Stephen Thorne and Mary C. Davis.

To make matters worse, many of the actors seemed as lost at sea as Antonio's merchandise. Stephen Berenson made a forceful, but rather uncomplicated, Shylock; don't look to his interpretation for any sense of magisterial depth - but I will always remember his performance for a poignant grace note at its finish: after Shylock's forced conversion at the hands of the Venetian court, his yarmulke lost, Berenson left the stage with his hand still groping to cover his head - he was determined somehow, despite everything, to stay true to his faith; it was the only glimpse of the character's tragic stature in the production, but it was a devastating one.

Would that the rest of the cast fared half so well!  But I'm afraid this production is littered with listless performances.  Stephen Thorne was simply the blankest Bassanio I've ever seen, while Joe Wilson Jr. made Antonio floridly gay, but pointlessly so, for we never believed in his love for Bassanio for a minute.  Meanwhile, as Portia, sturdy, smart newcomer Mary C. Davis showed promise, and managed the early comic scenes well enough; but she couldn't save the character from Columbus's misguided decision to turn her into a Christian avenger, and then back into a comedienne.  Rachael Warren made a more-appealing, and consistent, Nerissa, however, and you could tell the other young actors on stage - Will Austin, Caroline Kaplan, Darien Battle - likewise had some talent, but weren't able to access it here.

The show did come alive in its comic business - which is unusual, because the set-pieces in Merchant are pretty static.  Nevertheless, Joe Wilson, Jr. and Fred Sullivan, Jr., both made hilarious hay out of the Princes of Morocco and Aragon, respectively (by, of course, gently playing on prejudices, but never mind!).  Sullivan was particularly busy; he also contributed an intriguing cameo as Tubal - indeed, he may have suggested more mordant depth in Tubal than Berenson did in Shylock - as well as a broader turn as Gratiano.  Alas, I couldn't help but feel that his lesser work as Gratiano typified too much of the production, though: strident, overconfident, and unevocative.

F. Murray Abram as Shylock.

Director Darko Tresnjak does Shakespeare one huge favor in his brilliantly-updated production of The Merchant Venice (at ArtsEmerson through this weekend in a production from Theatre for a New Audience):

He doesn't let us pretend that times have changed.

That may not sound like much, but it has become a mantra in the academy (and in the politically-correct press) that the prejudices portrayed in Merchant of Venice are somehow a thing of the past.  We know better now, our professors tell us - we're teaching you better.

Ah, if only.

Because whatever the virtual Freedom Riders of the millennium may tell you, it is one thing to parrot what you learned in school, and create enlightenment zones where sensitivities can never be imperiled.  But it's another thing entirely to forge actual art from human society, which always and everywhere has fed on (and built its entertainment on) stereotypes both good and evil.

Now there's no doubt The Merchant of Venice traffics in evil stereotypes; its putative heroes and heroines call Jews "dogs," don't blanche at roughing them up or even spitting on them, and of course force Shylock, the play's totemic Jewish moneylender, to convert to Christianity; what's more, after this act of spiritual destruction, the happy heroes congratulate themselves on a day's work well done, and retire to a country house for a witty scene of love-badinage.  That is when they're not tossing the occasional slur in the general direction of black or gay people.

Horrible, right?  Right.  That Shakespeare must have been a very bad man.

Well - maybe, but maybe not.  For an entirely different cultural script has slowly unfurled over the centuries regarding The Merchant of Venice, one that casts the murderous Shylock not as villain but as hero. For as later interpreters have scanned the text, they've found enough sympathetic detail crammed into Shylock's scenes (and enough ironic subtext to the rest) to convince many that Shylock, as one academic would have it, is Shakespeare's first sketch of King Lear.

This should come as no surprise to readers of the Hub Review, where I have often explained that part of what makes Shakespeare so great is that his major plays almost always incorporate their own antithesis; they deconstruct themselves before our eyes (and hundreds of years before any professor did, or could). Why is this so? Well, part of the explanation probably lies in Shakespeare's strangely elusive identity; was he gay? Was he Catholic? Married yet living as a bachelor, accumulating wealth like a bourgeois yet carrying on like a bohemian, Shakespeare sustained an identity divided in almost every way it's possible to be divided; perhaps as a result, he operates as both insider and outsider in every dramatic situation he created for the stage.

Then there's the fact, rarely mentioned by the professors, that Shakespeare was his own best critic. Or rather the most insightful critic imaginable of his own cultural material. This is a point that's often missed in the common joke that Shakespeare "stole" his plots - he did (or at least most of them), although he transformed them into new forms which in every case completely replaced the original. More importantly, part of that transformation (of necessity) took the form of critique. Indeed, it's not too much to say that the vast majority of Shakespearean exegesis is merely a restatement of the Bard's own criticism, which he buried in his texts.

That burial was particularly deep in The Merchant of Venice, it's true, for we have little evidence that in its day it was received as anything but a popular comedy, with an evil villain who is unexpectedly defeated at the last minute.  It was only slowly, over a period of centuries, that society caught on to the devastating double image of itself that Shakespeare had coded into his comedy.  Indeed, by the time the superficially "Christian" content of Merchant had reached its murderous apotheosis in the "Final Solution," the play had already become a touchstone of a new tradition of anti-anti-Semitism.  Shakespeare's doubled identity had played out in history in much the same way it had, or would, in the cases of racism and sexism - where the Bard likewise seems to dabble in bigoted tropes on the surface of his work, while planting the cultural seeds to undo those injustices over the long term.

Still, the ant-Semitic surface of Merchant does shock modern sensibilities (and rightly so), and Tresnjak even ups the ante on a few of the play's cruel gambits (in one scene, Shylock is literally kicked to the ground).  But what's truly brilliant about his production is the way he insinuates ancient bigotries into an up-to-the-minute evocation of New York's financial elite; his Shylock all but lives his life beneath Wall Street's Big Board, while Antonio chums around with crass brokerage cowboys, and Portia's treasure chests are now Apple Powerbooks (and her suitors are Saudi princes).  In a way some of the Wall Street detail contradicts, frankly, the lines of Shakespeare's text (his Christians would never hedge or buy on margin), but it does no violence, actually, to one of the play's great themes: the co-existence of smug piety with the crudest hypocrisy.   Thus in this Merchant, Antonio's old Harvard looks disguise a deeply racist WASP hauteur, and Portia is no demure sibyl but rather a privileged Connecticut heiress with a judgmental attitude.  There's even a Chris-Rock-like comic (Jacob Ming-Trent) on hand, seemingly fresh from a Fox sitcom, to remind us of the racial cast of our own popular comedy (shades of The Shipment!).  In short, in transferring the mores of cosmopolitan Venice to cosmopolitan New York, this Merchant doesn't hold the mirror up to nature so much as hold the mirror up to us.

Portia as party girl.

And as long as Tresnjak can coast on this clever mise-en-scène, his Merchant grips us.  But it becomes clear as the play progresses that the director hasn't thought nearly as carefully about the central theme of Shakespeare's plot, which is not so much about the problem of prejudice but rather about the vexingly slippery relationship between love and money. And alas, at the same time we begin to realize that the actual performances moving through this brilliantly realized world are not as persuasive as their setting. Tresnjak's Bassanio and Antonio have little chemistry, for instance (and a last-minute smooch does little to alleviate that problem) - but then his Bassanio and Portia don't have much more, come to think of it.

And F. Murray Abraham's celebrated Shylock may be clearly (if softly) spoken, but it's also encased in a controlled urbanity that Abraham only rarely dares to break.  This may be interesting as concept (who else has tried it?), but it flattens out Shylock's profile, and seriously undermines the rising power of the celebrated courtroom scene.  Abraham's one moment of brilliance is his pin-pointing of the precise moment that Shylock cracks - when he learns that his daughter, who has abandoned him for a Christian, has sold his engagement ring for a monkey.  This moment  beautifully parallels the Christian Bassanio's indifference to his own wedding ring - and the irony is shattering.

Launcelot as Fox comic.

I wish I could think of a single high point in  Kate MacCluggage's power-girl Portia, however - Ms. McCluggage is clearly an actress of presence and ability, but in her confident coldness she's completely miscast, and is generally upstaged by Christen Simon Marabate as her maid, Nerissa. (And without a convincing Portia - whose very name cues you in to the fact that she is concerned with the meaning of justice - the deeper questions of the play simply go missing.) As Bassanio, Lucas Hall, is a bit more sympathetic, but is likewise often a cypher (and actually more melancholic than Antonio); it's as if the director dreamt up the perfect fleet of updated accoutrements to bridge the centuries, but couldn't figure out a similar fleet of characters to deploy them. As a result, this Merchant began to lurch, rather than flow, from point to point as Tresnjak tried to cover Shakespeare's many contradictory bases.  No wonder Melissa Miller's Jessica so often looked confused!

To be fair, there's better (sometimes far better) work around the edges of the production.  Mr. Ming-Trent was, indeed, hilarious as Lancelot Gobbo (above right), and Grant Goodman and Mattheew Schneck did small, cocky miracles with the throw-away roles of Solanio and Salerio.  Raphael Nash Thompson and Christopher Randolph likewise got their laughs as the Princes of Morocco and Aragon, respectively (which is not so easy to do), and Andrew Dahl made a surprisingly effective cameo out of the servant Balthasar.  You left this Merchant of Venice feeling that the "problem" of this play had in a way been solved - but that many of its themes had somehow been lost in the process.

Show me the money

Not so fast! Sarah Newhouse, Robert Walsh and Jeremiah Kissel hold that thought in The Merchant of Venice. (Photos by Stratton McCrady.)

Last week, Phoenix theatre sybil Carolyn Clay opined that "Naming The Merchant of Venice after Antonio is like naming Medea after Jason." Hmmm. Earth to Carolyn: it's not usually a good idea to bet against the Bard's artistic decisions. And I'll let you in on a little secret: The Merchant of Venice is named after Antonio, its eponymous businessman, because he is the play's haunted center, its slippery, unstable moral fulcrum. Portia and Bassanio, the young lovers Lorenzo and Jessica, even Shylock himself, all inhabit competing side shows branching from, or orbiting, his central thematic pillar. Many of Shakespeare's plays circle questions that are never answered, and in fact defy solution: "Why is Hamlet feigning madness?" "Why does Iago hate Othello?" In The Merchant of Venice, Antonio operates as a kind human factotum for a similar thematic question; he is the play's contradictory heart made flesh. So if you ain't got Antonio, you ain't got The Merchant of Venice.

And the Actors' Shakespeare Project ain't got Antonio; hence their current production of this problematic, but always compelling, comedy is no more than intermittently interesting, despite a daringly nasty turn as Shylock from Jeremy Piv - oops, I mean Jerry Kissel! The production gets into trouble the way many honorable productions do: by exploiting Shylock as a proxy for our modern horror at anti-Semitism, and then allowing said horror to overwhelm (or replace) the thematic complexity of the drama. This, of course, is understandable in a production whose director and star have made much of the fact that they are practicing Jews; and for us Gentiles, it allows us to feel good about the fact that we're not Nazis (some of us are just Republicans, that's all). And I suppose director and star deserve credit for going where goyim would fear to tread, and making their Shylock an obvious jerk - even a stereotypically crass, greedy "Jewish" jerk (albeit in subtle air quotes); this is arguably the most anti-Semitic interpretation of the character I've ever seen. But a new twist on Shylock by itself doesn't allow audiences to limn the cultural conundrums that Shakespeare explores in Merchant. And in a weird way, it actually lets Christianity itself - Shakespeare's real target - off the moral hook.

But don't get me wrong: The Merchant of Venice is anti-Semitic, no question, and any production must grapple with, and somehow justify its existence against, this content. But it is that very rare beast, an anti-Semitic tract written by a man who is obviously not, personally, anti-Semitic. (This should be your first clue that something very strange is going on in The Merchant of Venice.) Compare the play, for instance, to Marlowe's blood-curdlingThe Jew of Malta, and you suddenly realize that Shakespeare effected nothing less than a revolution in the stage treatment of Jews. True, his characters routinely spout anti-Semitic epithets, and Shylock is at some level a kind of object (as all the characters are) in a carefully-constructed dramatic paradox. But it is no exaggeration to say that Shylock is not only one of the most potent characters in literature, but also a great tragic figure (stuck in a romantic comedy!). Indeed, he's basically the first draft for Lear, arguably the greatest tragic figure in Western culture. And no anti-Semite would ever write a tragic Jewish character; bigotry just doesn't work that way.

Certainly this jarring dichotomy between character and context is part of what has kept the play alive for, lo, four hundred years. But the Actors' Shakespeare Project, and director Melia Bensussen, essentially undo its underlying tension and turn it into a hip, downtown version of Free to Be You and Me (crossed with Entourage). Although in Bensussen's vision, it seems you're only really free to be you and me if you're heterosexual and white. For Bensussen lets pass the play's racist moments (yep, Shakespeare throws a few of those to the crowd, too) seemingly sans comment (she gives some of them to an African-American actor, which oddly enough makes them more, rather than less, palatable). And via Robert Walsh's unpleasant non-performance as Antonio, she gelds the Bard's most complex and subtle portrait of a gay man (my tribe, by the way); in her panic to attack anti-Semitism, she seems to forget all about homophobia.

Now okay, maybe Antonio's not gay - maybe he's just a heterosexual man passionately in love with another man (Bassanio). Whatever. But whether or not he's a pitcher or a catcher, Antonio has to be in love, or The Merchant of Venice makes no sense, as at a deep level it's a meditation on the paradoxical co-existence of love and money. Essentially, Shylock keeps love and money separate, while Antonio, like Christian culture in general, mixes them promiscuously; indeed, he tries to make money "breed" not more money but love; seen in this way, he and Shylock are mirrored, rather than identical, twins (a constant trope in Shakespeare). But because Bensussen can only see the "money" half of this equation, she makes Antonio and Shylock alike only in that they're both assholes (whereas in most productions they're anything but). Hence Walsh's Antonio, rather than being melancholic or neurotic, is cold, arrogant, and derisive - he doesn't hate Shylock because he subconsciously perceives his moral challenge, he hates Shylock simply because he's a prick. And Jeremiah Kissel's Shylock is equally priapic; like, yes, Ari Gold, he's a walking psychological tic, obsessed with besting Christian contempt via high-octane, cynical comedy.

The only problem is that said "contempt" isn't actually part of the play; this ongoing showdown, manic as it is, is extra-curricular; it has to do with the text's milieu rather than the text itself (which is actually putting Christianity under a far more probing microscope). And Kissel's strategy - which is sometimes virtuosic technically - utterly misses much of Shylock's emotional resonance. For surprisingly enough, Shylock is a deeply romantic figure: he loves his religion, and the daughter who betrays him, and his lost wife, and even (a bit) his bigoted Christian servant. Indeed, because he's so hard-boiled, we have more trust in Shylock's love than in anyone else's in the play. Perhaps the text's most devastating moment, in fact, comes when he discovers his daughter has bartered a family ring for a monkey; a ring which "I had of Leah when I was a bachelor," he whispers. Rings loom large in this play, as seals of romantic love, and symbols of the kind of "bond" we are forbidden to break (unlike the perverse contract on Antonio's flesh). Indeed, in that one moment, as in a flash of lightning, Shakespeare subtly up-ends his whole structure, and lets us know that Shylock was secretly truer to love than Bassanio or Antonio proves to be; but in the ASP version of the play, the impact of the moment goes missing; it's just a sad grace note.

Like much of the production, unfortunately; indeed, I began to lose track of the missed opportunities in this performance. Jessica never seemed to notice that her new Christian friends weren't very Christian, and Lorenzo's discourse on music, itself one of the Bard's most lyrical songs, here came out pretty flat. Likewise Bassanio, played as a total "dude" (Robert Serrell, with Sarah Newhouse, above left) lacked even the interest of his own mysterious affections, and didn't seem much moved either by his mistress or by Antonio's predicament. And an entire thematic level had gone missing, too - that is, the theme of generational duty in which Jessica and Portia are mirrored (Jessica betrays her father, Portia honors hers); in fact the director entirely cut the early comic scene which announces the theme. So much for that, I suppose.

So what's left of The Merchant of Venice in the ASP version? Well, the usual drifting staging we expect from postmodern Shakespeare, dressed up in vintage or club clothing (another cliché by now; designers, please stop shopping at the Garment District!). The exciting space at Midway Studios is at least always interesting (and works best for the shadowy Venice of Jessica's escape), but could have been far more interesting with more focused lighting. There's one very good, broad performance from Doug Lockwood as Aragon; he does the standard schtick in the role (speech impediment, femme pomposity) but invests it with such commitment that it works, as usual. Meanwhile, the talented Marianna Bassham heads back to the trailer park for her interpretation of Nerissa - as she has for many roles - but still keeps the laughs coming, while Michael Forden Walker puts an interestingly low-key, slimy spin on her trashy new hubby. In what's arguably the lead, Sarah Newhouse makes a smart but somewhat superficial Portia; she's all sparkling, ribald intelligence - quite the convincing junior partner - but betrays few romantic (rather than sexual) depths, and even less in the way of real wisdom. Then again, the poor woman was fighting her costume for half the show (a tiger-striped halter top circa 1975, above left); no wonder she looked unwise! But then maybe out in Belmont you can't find a wardrobe for love or money.