Review: In Playing Shylock, Saul Rubinek Confronts a Theater Ruled by Fear

Playing Shylock, Mark Leiren-Young’s new solo play starring Saul Rubinek, opens by asking the audience to suspend our disbelief somewhere over the second balcony. We’re meant to accept that a theatrical production of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice has caused such a stir that protesters, enraged by the 427-year-old play’s antisemitism, have gathered outside the theater, leading to the show’s cancellation.

If only the theater aroused such interest and passion! Honestly, if Slam Frank is still running, no way is Shakespeare going down.

But it is a testament to Rubinek’s undiminished power as an actor and storyteller (the Frasier and Warehouse 13 actor last appeared on a New York stage in 1990) that, by the end of this play’s invigorating 100 minutes, I was fully on board with both the premise and Rubinek’s cathartic cry for the gatekeepers of our cultural institutions to collectively grow a pair.

Rubinek emerges from backstage to the sound of Olivia Wheeler’s forebodingly serious original music (hilarious) to inform the audience that the second half of Merchant will not go on. Reading from an embargoed press release, he peppers the producers’ mealy-mouthed statement with his own commentary: “We hope you know that we believe in putting ideas on stage, presenting work that engenders conversation… Oh somebody give them a fucking medal… Continuing our production of Merchant of Venice at this particular time would not have achieved these goals in a healthy and responsible way. Translation? Something scared a sponsor.”

And when we stop to consider the theater’s increasing reliance on the patronage of a handful of wealthy individuals and institutions, this story becomes more plausible. No physical protests are required.

What follows is an impassioned defense of Merchant as a play (“from the 17th century on it was THE play. Bigger than Lear. Bigger than Midsummer. Bigger than Hamlet”) and Shylock as a role (“the first three-dimensional Jewish character in the history of English literature”). Rubinek goes further and makes the case that Shylock should be portrayed as Jewish and played by a Jewish actor, something contemporary producers often avoid: “There are productions where Shylock is Black… Shylock is indigenous… Shylock is Palestinian. But Jewish? How positively retro.”

And yet the retro context of Merchant is an England that had seen very few Jews in the centuries following the expulsion of 1290, in which the blockbuster of the day was Marlowe’s blatantly antisemitic The Jew of Malta. So it surely counts as an act of artistic courage for Shakespeare to have asked that same audience, “Hath not a Jew eyes?… If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”

We get to hear Rubinek’s gripping interpretation of that speech, and all of Shylock’s major speeches. He incants them in the lilting Mitteleuropean accent of his father, who was raised into an Orthodox family in Poland but cut off his payot to become an actor in the Yiddish theater. He too always wanted to play Shylock but never got the chance.

His parents’ survival through the war (Rubinek was born in a refugee camp outside Munich) and subsequent journey to Canada is just one particularly thrilling part of a solo show that abounds with insight and anecdote. Leiren-Young beautifully captures Rubinek’s voice on the page for an event that feels spontaneous and conversational on the stage.

Director Martin Kinch delivers first-class production values without distracting from the heroic performance at the heart of the play. It takes place on Shawn Kerwin’s fully realized set, which imagines a chamber in the Doge’s Palace, a frayed wooden cross dangling precariously over the stage. The word “Jew” is graffitied on an upstage wall, with Rubinek outfitted in full Orthodox garb, like he just wandered up from Eastern Parkway (Kerwin also did the costumes).

Every element makes it instantly clear that Rubinek and Leiren-Young’s ideal production would not soft-pedal Shylock’s Judaism, but would underline it through design and even rewrites. It’s an essential part of this drama about a man thriving in a legal and economic system designed to keep him in the ghetto, who is driven to believe that the only justice he will ever receive is a pound of flesh from his enemy.

Rubinek muses, “What if Portia tries to defeat Shylock not by appealing to his humanity, but to his Judaism? And still, even knowing Judaism would excommunicate him, Shylock still chooses revenge.” He pauses for us to consider. “I thought that was worth looking at today. Right?”

Driven by a fearless curiosity and a belief in the transformative power of theater, Playing Shylock is a bracing reminder that the freedom of expression we have come to enjoy in North America is a relatively new development, and is presently slipping away in particularly stupid and insidious ways. We should fight like hell to keep it.