The Merchant of Venice

The Merchant of Venice is a play about class, appearances, preconceptions and facades. In Venice, much like in New York City, people struggle daily to keep up their images, to steel themselves to meet the financial and social demands of urban society while their true desires and feeling languish unattended. Our production will focus on what is unspoken, the void created between characters trying to conceal their humanity in order to maintain expectations. In this play, as in life, misconceptions, prejudice and intolerance are born out of the characters’ inability to speak the truth in their hearts and face the possibility that maybe no human is meant to face the world in isolation.