Lily Rabe as Portia, Byron Jennings as Antonio and Al Pacino as Shylock
(Photo credit: Joan Marcus)
While the big news of the Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park repertory season was intended to be film star Al Pacino’s stage debut as Jewish moneylender Shylock in Shakespeare’s problem comedy, The Merchant of Venice, the real news is the magnificent production directed by Daniel Sullivan.
Sullivan, you may recall, turned the all-star production of Twelfth Night at Central Park’s Delacorte Theater last year into an enchanted evening. This year he has again turned his cast, which also includes Lily Rabe, Hamish Linklater (last year’s Sir Andrew Aguecheek), Byron Jennings, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Jesse L. Martin, Matthew Rauch, and Max Wright, into a true ensemble. Whether these actors have worked together before or not, Sullivan would make you believe that they have lived in the same community for years.
“Community” is the key word here and with it Sullivan seems to have solved the problem of the play’s inherent anti-Semitism which has been always been a thorny issue since World War II. As he interprets it, the Venice of The Merchant is a city ruled by money, class and power. The constant greeting with which the characters hail each other, “What news on the rialto?” can be translated in modern terms to London’s City, Paris’ Bourse, and New York’s Wall Street.
His Venice is a city of the in-crowd and the out-crowd. It is a gated community both keeping people in and others out. Designer Mark Wendland has created a circular playing area with circles of gates and fences that continually rotate, ever revealing new enclosed locales. The play opens with a new scene of the Venice stock market with a ticker tape center stage and an exchange board off to the side. As the bell rings, the merchants depart: the Christian gentlemen in their morning suits to one side and the Jews in their skull caps to the other. The lines have been drawn.
The costuming by Jess Goldstein is from the Edwardian era, one famous for its manners on the surface and its virulent hypocrisy below. This is also a city of bigotry and prejudice. The rich Christian Venetians never lose an opportunity to mock the Jews whether by spitting at them or making hurtful comments. One of the fancy dress costumes for the masquers at Venice’s famed carnival is an insulting depiction of an elderly Jew.
That Shylock lives in a ghetto, albeit a palatial one, is made abundantly clear by the walls of fences that encircle his domain. When we meet both the rich fatherless heiress Portia and Shylock’s heir, the unmarried Jessica, they are both surrounded by gates like birds in gilded cages. Both will escape: Jessica by running away with her Christian lover Lorenzo and Portia by donning men’s habit and taking another name. On the other hand, the carefree young Venetians, Bassanio, Gratanio, Solanio and Salerio, are appropriately shown outside of these gates and fences as they go freely in a city that has given them carte blanche to do as they wish.
Pacino brings world-weariness to his Shylock as a man who has grown tired of all the scorn he has continually received in his native city for practicing his religion. No wonder when Antonio, the rich merchant who has heaped abuse on him all these years, comes to request a loan to allow his impecunious young friend Bassanio to woo the rich Portia, does Shylock ask for a pound of flesh as his bond for lending three thousand ducats.
A wordless scene that Sullivan has added to the second act has Shylock being violently baptized after his loss in Antonio’s bankruptcy hearing. The shock of this scene makes it clear that Shylock is a victim, rather than a villain. Unlike his performance in the 2004 film version directed by Michael Radford, here Pacino’s Shylock is low-key yet moving, showing us a broken man when he discovers his daughter’s flight. His physical posture after the baptism shows us a man literally without a country.
However, The Merchant of Venice is classified as a comedy and the play has three pairs of lovers. Rising star Lily Rabe who has appeared on Broadway in Steel Magnolias, Heartbreak House and The American Plan, makes Portia the center of the play as she should be: it is her journey after all and ends with her being reunited with her new husband. Rabe’s commanding performance first shows us the witty and blithe heiress, the passionate lover, the intellectual lawyer when she dons men’s attire to appear at Antonio’s trial under the tutelage of the absent jurist Doctor Bellario, and finally, the sadder and wiser woman of the world when she returns home in the play’s last scene. Rather than perform her “Quality of Mercy” speech to Venice’s court as though it were a memorized and showy bit, she says it conversationally as if she were thinking it through at that moment. It is all the more powerful for the rethinking.
Hamish Linklater, who stole last year’s Twelfth Night from such accomplished players as Audra McDonald, Raśl Esparza, David Pittu and Jay O. Sanders, makes the slacker Bassanio into a charming romantic hero who has a pretty good estimation of his true self. His self-mocking exaggeration only makes him more endearing. He is one of the boys until he is elevated by his all consuming love for Portia which makes a better man of him.
As Nerissa, Portia’s lady-in-waiting, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, best known for her role as the long-lost daughter in Mike Leigh’s Secrets and Lies, is a delightful sidekick, both humoring her mistress as well as chiding her for her excesses. As her suitor, Jesse L. Martin makes the cheeky and impudent Gratiano a memorable comic character.
Surprisingly, Heather Lind and Bill Heck do little as lovers Jessica and Lorenzo and their last act poetic debate (“On such a night as this…”) is one of the production’s few flaws. Lind redeems herself in the play’s final moment when given the document awarding Jessica her father’s wealth at his death, she lets us see how little the money means to her and feel depth of the sacrifice she has made to marry Lorenzo.
Byron Jennings’ Antonio is another character that has not been thought out as well as the others. Jennings plays the merchant in distress as an unchangingly melancholy character throughout. However, twice as old as his friend Bassanio, there is no explanation of their relationship. Nevertheless, the final moments of the play when the pairs of married lovers go off together into Portia’s mansion, the bachelor Antonio walks off slowly in the other direction, as much an outcast as the play’s other merchant, Shylock.
Several of the minor characters give bravura performances in roles that can often be overlooked. Max Wright is hilarious as the Prince of Arragon, Portia’s doddering suitor, in the casket scene in which his incorrect choice makes him ineligible for her hand in marriage. His discovery of his mistake is priceless. As Launcelot Gabbo, Jesse Tyler Ferguson is hilarious as Shylock’s insolent and clever servant who defects to the Christians and always seems to know how to turn events to his advantage. Matthew Rauch, who has had leading roles in all of the Red Bull Theater’s recent reinterpretations of Elizabethan classics, makes Antonio’s friend Solanio into a notably crafty courtier.
Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice offers directors two seemingly insurmountable problems: how to deal with the play’s anti-Semitism and how to make this into a believably romantic comedy. With a little bit of tweaking of the script and an interpretation that solves both problems, Daniel Sullivan has given us another enchanted evening under Central Park’s stars. He has also given Al Pacino (making his Shakespeare in the Park debut) and the rest of the talented cast a haunting production in which they can shine.
The Merchant of Venice (in rotating repertory through August 1)
The Public Theater at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park, entrances at Central Park West & 81st Street, and Fifth Avenue & 79th Street, in Manhattan
For information on the free ticket distribution or the virtual line call 212-539-8750 or http://Shakespeareinthepark.org