Revisionist hatchet job on Shakespeare

Subject: revisionist hatchet job on Shakespeare

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/21/opinion/21dowd.html?_r=2&th&emc=th

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/21/opinion/21dowd.html?_r=2&=&%2359;th=&%2359;emc=th&pagewanted=print

July 20, 2010

Ancient Grudges, Anew

By MAUREEN DOWD

So how do you turn one of Hitler's favorite plays into a production that New Yorkers can love?

You balance a Jewish moneylender's ugly urge to physically cut his enemy's heart from his body with a Christian merchant's ugly urge to symbolically cut his enemy's soul from his body.

You acknowledge that this is the only Shakespearean play that has jumped its category, morphing from "a comical history" into a disturbing drama. You realize that such a scalding tale of money, religious faith and bad faith in relationships — the same elements roiling today's world — cannot have a festive romantic comedy finale.

And you let Shylock — written as a comic villain three centuries after Jews were, in essence, expelled from England and then allowed back only to do the dirty work of usury — evolve into an abused and damaged man. After his daughter runs off with his ducats and diamonds to marry a Christian and convert, he wants revenge.

"The play has a very dark heart," says Daniel Sullivan, the director of "The Merchant of Venice" now at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, starring Al Pacino. "It's simply a matter of allowing that heart to bleed through the rest of the play."

After the Holocaust, he said, there's no way to play it as a comedy.

The last time the play was produced at the Delacorte was in 1962, when George C. Scott starred as Shylock. The New York Board of Rabbis protested, calling Shylock "an amalgam of vindictiveness, cruelty and avarice."

Joseph Papp, who was Jewish, fended off the rabbis and told Scott to "go all the way" because the audience would understand biblical wrath. Papp quoted from "King Lear": "Anger has a privilege."

Sullivan speculated that Shakespeare wanted to follow up on the success of Christopher Marlowe's "The Jew of Malta." "But that was a poisonously anti-Semitic play and Shakespeare could not do what Marlowe did," the director said. "He created a human being, for better or worse, who continues to nettle us."

Portia dresses up like a man to play a lawyer, and cleverly rebuts Shylock's demand for a pound of flesh in return for Antonio defaulting on his debt. She informs Shylock that he's not allowed to shed a drop of Christian blood while he exacts his pound, so he's stymied.

She also notes that since he is "an alien" who schemed to take the life of a Venetian, he must forfeit his property and fortune. When Antonio demands that Shylock convert to Christianity, the moneylender responds: "I am content."

But Sullivan didn't buy it. So he added a searing baptism scene, where Christian church men tear off Shylock's yarmulke and push him into the water as the priest prays in Latin and makes the Sign of the Cross over him. Shylock's frightened Jewish friends huddle on the side in the dark.

"He's broken, and the baptism is the thing that revives him," Sullivan says. Pacino, mesmerizing as Shylock, rejects his friends' entreaties to hurry away. He puts his yarmulke back on and deliberately walks past the Christians, who ominously track him offstage.

"Are they following him to do him harm?" Sullivan muses. "My feeling is they probably are. I don't think he survives."

He recalled that a friend of his appeared in the play at a Shakespeare festival in Utah and when Shylock said he would convert to Christianity, Mormons in the audience broke into applause.

"I realized that's what Shakespeare's audiences must have done," Sullivan said.

He set the play in turn-of-the-century Venice, at the advent of electricity, traders and stock markets.

The customary happy ending is replaced by depleted lust and aching questions. The text is the same, but body language and emphasis imply power struggles and disillusionment in love.

"The last act has always been problematic," the director said, "because it's always been this 'Hurray, the wicked Jew has been defeated' celebration."

In this version, after successfully masquerading as a man in Venice, Lily Rabe's Portia returns to her sumptuous estate in Belmont and realizes she can't have it all as a woman. One of Shakespeare's most sparkling heroines finds herself tied to a callow, bisexual, disloyal, tippling fortune-hunter.

Portia, her handmaiden, Nerissa, and Shylock's daughter, Jessica, don't trip off into the sunrise. Haunted by the harrowing events in Venice, the women go off separately to contemplate their flighty husbands and wonder: Is that all there is?

Everything is transactional. Obsession with money can trip you up. Obsession with love can let you down. And what could be a more modern message than that?