The Jew of Malta
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SHOW INFORMATION
Opened Feb 4, 2007
Closed Mar 11, 2007
WHAT IS IT ABOUT?
Academy Award-winner F. Murray Abraham plays Barabas in The Jew of Malta by Christopher Marlowe, directed by David Herskovits. Presented in rotating repertory with TFNA's The Merchant of Venice.
Before his brief life came to its shockingly violent end, Shakespeare's contemporary Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) wrote four daring, outrageous masterpieces of verse drama. The Jew of Malta, the most startling of them (and perhaps for that reason the least frequently revived) tells the story of Barabas, the wealthiest man on the island of Malta: Cheated out of his fortune by the government after he has saved Malta from the Turks, Barabas dedicates his life to wholesale revenge in ways that are terrifying and often terrifyingly funny. A super-hero who is also a super-villain, in what some have thought of as the blank verse equivalent of a comic book, he is a figure for the ages, in a black comedy played out on an epic scale.
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The argument traditionally goes that Elizabethan playwrights were not necessarily anti-Semitic themselves; they were just reflecting the intemperate nature of their times. Judged by the Theatre for a New Audience tandem presentations of William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice and Christopher Marlowe's
The Jew of Malta, it's safe to say that the two quill-happy Elizabethans could not be called pro-Semitic by any stretch of the forgiving imagination.
Seeing the plays back-to-back in the TFANA's oblique rumination on today's seeming dramatic rise of global anti-Semitism, it almost seems as if Shakespeare decided he'd appropriate several of Marlowe's plot points in order to state them [...]