Shylock (John Douglas Thompson) prepares to excise a “pound of flesh nearest the heart” from the chest of his defaulting borrower, Antonio (Alfredo Narciso), in Arin Arbus’s production of The Merchant of Venice at Brooklyn’s Theatre for a New Audience. Photograph by Gerry Goodstein.
When most people think of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, it’s Shylock who springs to mind, not the titular merchant. As a Jew in a Christian city-state, Shylock is an outsider; as a moneylender in an economy that reviles usury, he’s a pariah. Director Arin Arbus has chosen John Douglas Thompson, one of the most accomplished classical actors of his generation, as Shylock in her modern-dress production at Theatre for a New Audience (TFANA). Thompson, reportedly the first Black actor to play Shylock professionally in New York, finds music even in the most acidic passages of the Bard’s rhetoric; his nuanced performance explodes at crucial points, with moral indignation outstripping self-pity.
Shakespeare’s complicated plot is set in motion by romantic aspirations of Bassanio (Sanjit De Silva), a nobleman who has squandered his patrimony. Desperate for funds to pursue an heiress, Bassanio asks his friend Antonio (Alfredo Narciso)—the merchant of the title—for a loan, but Antonio has his money tied up in several commercial ventures. “Thou knowest that all my fortunes are at sea,” he says. “Neither have I money nor commodity/To raise a present sum.”
Antonio anticipates his ships will come in (literally speaking) within three months, carrying freight for resale. He volunteers to borrow funds so Bassanio may wage a lavish courtship of Portia (Isabel Arraiza). For this short-term loan, Antonio turns to Shylock, whom he despises but finds useful.
In Arbus’s dark, fiercely moral interpretation of The Merchant of Venice, the chemistry between Isabel Arraiza as Portia and Sanjit De Silva as Bassanio may remind some audience members that this play is often staged as primarily a romantic comedy. Photograph by Henry Grossman.
Over four centuries, The Merchant has been classified as a romantic comedy, but many aspects of the story are horrific. There’s a lottery, established in the will of Portia’s late father, requiring her to marry the winner or forfeit the riches of her inheritance. There’s the scene in which Portia acclaims the “quality of mercy,” impersonating a lawyer and fooling the court not only about her identity but also her gender (and, what’s stranger, fooling Bassanio, whom she has recently married). Most perturbing is Shylock’s loan, which includes a chilling provision: If Antonio defaults on timely repayment, he must bare his chest and permit Shylock to excise “a pound of flesh nearest the heart.”
In Arbus’s hands, this ostensible comedy is a morally engaged examination of how outsiders and nonconformists suffer in Shakespeare’s Venice. Under her gaze, all characters (even the outsiders themselves) are complicit in the prejudice and self-perpetuating hatred that fester in this city-state. To mine the core of dark matter underneath the saga’s Scheherazade-ish charm, Arbus and her designers have stripped The Merchant of visual beguilements. Further, Arbus streamlines the scenes of rustic comedy involving clownish Lancelet Gobbo (Nate Miller) and eliminates his comically addled father.
Costumer Emily Rebholz clothes the actors in business suits, exercise togs, and nondescript “dress-down” combinations. Riccardo Hernandez’s scenery evokes the look of Brutalist architecture. Against this drab aesthetic, the fantastical elements of Shakespeare’s story are as surreal as accounts of contemporary politics on the Internet’s 24/7 newsfeed and easily analogized to horrors around the latter-day world.
Although Thompson is the cynosure of this production, Arbus elicits creditable performances from the rest of the 14-member cast. Danaya Esperanza is noteworthy as Jessica, Shylock’s self-loathing daughter, “ashamed to be [her] father’s child” and determined to “become a Christian and … loving wife” to Lorenzo (David Lee Huyhn).
Danaya Esperanza as Jessica, Shylock’s daughter, and Nate Miller as his servant Lancelet Gobbo, make common cause as they plot separate escapes from the moneylender’s influence. Photograph by Gerry Goodstein.
As Solanio, Yonatan Gebeyehu makes the most of a modest role. Denouncing Shylock, he embodies hatred with an imprecation that’s quaint to modern ears yet, by inspired inflection, proves the evening’s supreme insult: “Impenetrable cur!”
Arraiza and De Silva generate appealing chemistry that’s complicated by Antonio’s preexisting claim on Bassanio’s affections. Almost tacitly, Arraiza conveys Portia’s complex emotions when, late in the play, she perceives the depth of affection between the two men, a relationship depicted as romantic in this production.
What audiences will remember, though, is Thompson’s resonant voice, ringing out against a vast array of injustices, ancient and modern (including, of course, the never-ending plague of anti-Semitism): “Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions … warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is?” Thanks to Thompson’s fiery performance, TFANA’s Merchant (to twist a phrase of Portia’s) is an exquisite candle sending its beams across a naughty world.
The Merchant of Venice, co-produced by TFANA and the Shakespeare Theatre Company (STC) of Washington, D.C., runs at TFANA (262 Ashland Place, Brooklyn) through March 6. Evening performances are at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 22–27, March 1 and March 4–6; matinees are at 2 p.m. Feb. 26 and 27 (open-captioned performance), and March 5 and 6. Thereafter the production will play at STC from March 22 to April 21. For tickets and information, visit www.tfana.org.
