Performance Review

The Merchant Of Venice

The two recent major U.S. productions of The Merchant of Venice represent two different approaches to Shakespearean performance. The first, Peter Sellars's Venice Beach version at the Goodman, was heavy with ideas and inventiveness, but painfully slow, badly acted, and dependent on a large-scale interpretive conceit that was only intermittently revealing. The other, by Barry Edelstein at the Public Theatre, had skimpy and undistinguished designs and no governing concept, but it explored the text's difficulties with relentless clarity and committed, honest performances. Sellars's production outraged a lot of Goodman subscribers, but it received national media coverage, went on to tour Europe, and is being made into a film. Edelstein's passed largely unnoticed, except for a damning review by Vincent Canby in the New York Times; yet it was a much more consistently rewarding theatrical experience, and kept its audience gripped.

Sellars's production foundered under the weight of his own aggressive creativity. His reading of the play as "what happens when mercantile attitudes are applied to personal relationships" was dead on target, and the contemporary L.A. setting thoroughly appropriate. Yet the production, in spite of its powerful conception, was profoundly unengaging and excruciatingly slow; Sellars barely cut a line of the text, so the production ran close to four hours. His young television-trained cast looked dwarfed and uncomfortable on the large, harshly lit stage, which was bare to the white hard cyclorama at the back. All of the actors were miked: the microphones, together with the vast bare stage and severe white lights, had the effect of distancing the characters, since it wasn't always apparent who was speaking; the actors apparently didn't bother to work to be understood. Much of the acting was seen in close-up on several large video monitors, as actors carried camcorders around with them in several scenes. The only set consisted of video equipment and a few office tables and chairs. The one clever touch in the design was the presence, throughout the play, of the three caskets, which were literally coffins, painted gold, silver, and black.

Sellars used his multiracial cast selectively: all the Venetian gents were Hispanic; the Jews were black; Portia and her retinue Asian; Launcelot and his father, who doubled as the Duke, were the only anglos. Joe Quintero and Richard Coca played Solerio and Solanio with sly mockery, puncturing the sentiment of Bassanio and Antonio's homosexual relationship. Portia, played by Elaine Tse, gave the production's one cripplingly bad performance. She was devoid of the wit that makes this least attractive of Shakespeare's heroines bearable, and wallowed in often inexplicable self-pity and rage. Portia was not the only one emotionally overloading trivial lines: Jessica was similarly overwrought, while Launcelot gave most of his part in violent sadistic barks.

Paul Butler's Shylock brought a welcome note of gravity to the production. Butler is a huge and weighty actor, capable of subtle modulations between gravity and merriment, and with a confident talent for understatement that was heartily welcome in this overstrained, hysterical production. Butler made the Shakespearean idiom his own without sacrificing its richness or variety, and found nuances and rhythms within the text that suited his own distinctive and memorable characterization. Grand and confident in a well-tailored business suit, Butler's Shylock won easy audience favor with his gravelly bass voice and lewd laughter. The "pound of your fair flesh" was given no special pointing by Butler, suggesting that it is indeed a "merry jest" as Shylock says (and as Sellars no doubt intended)--but it was a strength of Butler's performance that the audience wasn't sure.

The trial scene was the most effective in the production. When Shylock warned of the danger to the city if justice was denied him, the microphones went off for the only time in the entire production, he addressed the audience directly, and the battering of Rodney King appeared on the video screens. It was a devastating moment, true to the play, to Sellars's vision of contemporary America, and to the actual situation of an upper-class white audience confronted by black anger. The turning point of the trial, however, was hopelessly melodramatic. Portia's hysterical denunciation of Shylock was inexplicable, given her obvious hatred for Antonio. Butler escaped with some dignity and the rest of the play descended into violent recriminations among the lovers.

Edelstein's production had no such contemporary hook as the L.A. riots, but it still felt up-to-date in its truthful exploration of the difficulties in human relationships mediated by race, sex, and culture. The vaguely period designs ranged from adequate to ugly, but the intimate Anspacher Theatre allowed the actors immediate access to the audience. The production was marked by exceptional clarity of thought, speech and meaning; a clarity that made the text's ethical complexity uncomfortably evident. The Merchant of Venice provides no easy answers, no pure motives, no wholly [End Page 94] likeable or wholly irredeemable characters. Unlike the sweepingly defined cut-outs of Sellars's production, these characters were revealed moment to moment in actions that were both surprising and truthful.

Laila Robbins's superb Portia was the emotional core of the production. Lively and lonely, intelligent and frustrated, Robbins's Portia came across as a woman of a certain age who sees through the stupidity of the conventions that thwart her but is unable to escape them. She committed herself totally to Jay Goede's good-looking, boyish Bassanio in a painfully moving love scene, then almost immediately began to have her illusions stripped away. Robbins's gradual and precise recognitions of the faults in her husband's character, in Venetian society, and in her own world view made riveting drama. Antonio was not so much Portia's rival as her mirror. In Byron Jennings's saturnine performance, Antonio was smart enough to know he was being used, but too lonely to resist; smart enough to recognize injustice, but too mired in prejudice to avoid perpetuating it.

Standing apart from the rest of the production was Ron Leibman's ferocious Shylock. Leibman attacked the role with riveting intensity and technical precision, matching the emotional power of his Roy Cohn from Angels in America. Initially weary and cynical, self-mocking but self-satisfied, he became a truly terrifying avenger. Shutting out audience sympathy through the manic pace of his delivery, he nonetheless commanded the stage in a performance that was simultaneously alienating and involving. In the trial scene's most telling moment, he daubed Antonio's bare breast with a circle of yellow paint matching the insignia on his black cloak. He was silent and contained in his final defeat, but gave the courtroom and theatre audiences a parting glare that indicted both.

The ring scene served as a summing-up of the production's approach. The argument over the rings was played seriously, as a final test of which of Bassanio's lovers had his faith. Antonio's own pledge of Bassanio's fidelity thus became an offer of sacrifice. In the end, Portia remained onstage and let Antonio and Bassanio go off together. Alone onstage at the end, she seemed to be trying to come to grips with her own actions and the uneasy tangle of relationships of which she was the center. One sensed, in the final act of this Merchant, that the characters want to be better than they have yet learned to be.

James Norris Loehlin
Dartmouth College

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