Review: The Merchant of Venice and a Revolting Shylock at Classic Stage

It’s not uncommon for directors to force their own visions onto the plays of William Shakespeare, however unsupported by the text. The results range from charming to excruciating, and while the latter is more common, that has rarely dissuaded a self-styled genius from taking a meat cleaver to the greatest dramas of the English language. Venerated though Shakespeare is, he is also dead and lawyer-less, his plays having long since entered the public domain. He has no redress against an auteur — spare bad reviews.

Igor Golyak, the visionary behind Arlekin Players Theatre and its superb production of Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s Our Class, has taken that excellent ensemble of actors (with a few additions) and recast them in his own adaptation of The Merchant of Venice at Classic Stage Company (which is not producing this production). Not to be outdone by his peers, Golyak offers his audience not one, but three distinct concepts in this dreadful mess of a Merchant.

Golyak presents the first in an original monologue at the top, when a frantic T.R. Knight welcomes us to “The Antonio Show,” a late-night talk show for which we are the live studio audience (he is Antonio). It’s the kind of talk show with puppets and sexy dancers — in short, it’s European, with all the broad comedy that entails.

“The Merchant of Venice is meant to be a comedy,” Antonio assures us, noting that Shakespeare was influenced by commedia dell’arte, with its masks, stock characters, and easily digestible morals. Oh dear, I thought as the second of Golyak’s concepts emerged and Knight desperately executed a bit of improbable slapstick involving a long sheet. It never gets much funnier than that.

And so we learn of Antonio’s sadness as he speaks to the puppets Salarino and Salanio (one for each of Knight’s hands). And we meet our first guest on the couch, Bassanio (José Espinosa), who pines for the heiress Portia (Alexandra Silber) but lacks the funds to compete with her other suitors. The merchant Antonio is cash-strapped but secures a loan of 3,000 ducats from the Jewish moneylender Shylock (Richard Topol wearing Groucho glasses and a vampire cape). There’s a catch: If Antonio is unable to repay the debt in a timely manner, he must forfeit a pound of his own flesh.

Though driven by the legitimate grievance of a religious minority in a militantly Catholic society, Shylock is a ghoul, and I’m convinced that Shakespeare intended his audience (which would have held medieval attitudes about Jews in a country with very few of them in the centuries following the expulsion of 1290) to view him as such. But for at least two centuries, directors and actors imbued with Enlightenment values and sensitive to the scourge of antisemitism have made a good-faith effort to humanize him, using the famous “Hath not a Jew eyes?” speech as a springboard.

Topol performs this passage with admirable lucidity, removing his Groucho glasses and temporarily causing Golyak’s manic fog to lift as the other actors shift nervously. But we soon discover that this is just another of the director’s inventions as the actor, Richard, stages a metatheatrical revolt against the blood libel in which he has been cast.

The problem with this approach is that it sucks the oxygen from every other theme and character in this complex problem play, causing them to wither. This is glaring when we witness Shylock hold a knife to Antonio’s throat as a visibly shaken Silber looks on, book in hand, sputtering platitudes about the quality of mercy (Silber absolutely could have played Portia as the shark she is, but frustratingly recedes in a cut of the text that is not very interested in her). Bafflingly, Knight abandons both talk show host and commedia clown in this moment, adopting a grand Shakespearean cadence straight out of the 19^th century (of all the actors, he seems the most adrift).

This when Jan Pappelbaum’s scenic design suggests a modern if low-rent television studio, with actors and technicians (appropriate costumes by Sasha Ageeva) running around, a camera regularly pointed at the action. Golyak, who did the video design, occasionally projects live video onto the upstage wall, but its use pales in comparison to what Jamie Lloyd is doing. It’s another halfhearted choice.

Seth Reiser’s lighting suggests a highly controlled environment, although it regularly fails in its primary purpose of illuminating the faces of the actors, especially when Topol stalks off. And Fedor Zhuravlev’s original compositions are there, less cinematic underscoring than vaguely mood-setting elevator music.

These bells and whistles add very little to a production in which the line deliveries never rise above adequate, and many of them are incoherent. It all betrays a director tossing spaghetti at the wall and hoping it will stick while declining to dig deep into the verse, perhaps out of fear of what he might discover there.

And there are still great treasures to unearth in this comedy-drama about our misplaced faith in laws and contracts written by men on paper, but treated like commandments carved onto stone tablets by the breath of God. A motivated sociopath with considerable earthly power and a talent for rhetoric (as Portia surely is) can easily massage the law to her will. That’s as true in our merchant republic as it was in Venice. Unfortunately, all this misbegotten Merchant reveals is a contemporary obsession with identity that has culturally reached a dead end.