In this ‘Merchant of Venice’, tragedy tomorrow, comedy tonight – The Forward

The cast of The merchant of Venice, directed and edited by Igor Golyak. Photo by Kirill Simakov

By PJ Grisar
November 12, 2024

This Shylock is wearing Groucho glasses.

Storming the stage during a rehearsal for director Igor Golyak Merchant of VeniceRichard Topol plays it to the hilt. He calculates his rate of interest on the back of an unwilling heathen. He rubs his fingers over imaginary ducats and beats his chest in Yom Kippur tempo as he declares that “suffering is the hallmark of our entire race.”

Topol embodies the role Shakespeare wrote: the Jewish usurer demanding his literal pound of flesh.

But when the titular merchant Antonio, played by TR Knight, and his friends are out of earshot, Topol’s kvetchy, monstrous moneylender takes off his novelty glasses and soberly tells the audience how these good Christians are “my Jewish gabardine.”

His intention in breaking character, Topol says, is to remind the audience “that the character I’m playing is being treated like shit for no reason.”

Funny things. Or at least it was meant to be in the 16th century.

When the play was published in Shakespeare’s first Quarto, The Merchant of Venice (with the extreme cruelty of Shylock the Jew) was classified as a comedy. but since then it has become the ultimate problem game. Modern productions, in the post-Holocaust period, strive to transform Shylock into a tragic figure to make a point about tolerance that the text itself opposes.

Igor Golyak had a different idea.

“It was a comedy for the time,” says Golyak, who will debut his Trader November 22 at the Classic Stage Company in New York after its critically acclaimed second series Our classa Holocaust drama, with largely the same cast. “It was a comedy where good defeats evil.”

The evil – the villain – was of course the Jew.

To that end, after a 2021 production in Boston, Golyak sets his play in a kind of fusion of a late night talk show and Saturday evening livewith the aim of recreating for a 21st century audience the popular entertainment of the 16th century as enjoyed by the ground-dwellers of the Globe. The aim is to play it in the key of comedy, with a live band and scenes performed as skits. In this setup, Shylock is a source of stale ethnic humor, which will stop being so funny as the show progresses.

“I’m really trying to look at it and see if we as an audience have changed,” said Golyak, who is Jewish and immigrated to the U.S. from Ukraine at the age of 11. “Is it just the quality of our perception that has changed, or have we changed?”

“One of the most important points for me is that evil lives in good people,” added Golyak, who wants Shylock’s oppressors to become a sympathetic comedy troupe, implying the audience is laughing along.

Topol, who in Our class plays the character Abram, the only member of a Polish class who left the country before the Holocaust, must make a difficult turn when he comes to rehearsals for Trader. In Our classhis character ‘populated the world’ with descendants and became a rabbi. In Trader he goes to a bleaker place that he compares to Peter Finch’s Howard Beale Network (and, so as not to spoil much, Arthur Fleck joker).

“I’m about to embark on a journey that is so much darker for me,” said Topol, who understudied Al Pacino’s Shylock in a 2010 Broadway production, “on the edge, crazy, vengeful, carrying the burden of the whole history of anti-Semitism . .”

“This production asks me to confront my own relationship with my Jewishness in the world we live in now, which is conflicted, to be clear,” says Topol, who is now most connected to the character as a father. (Shylock’s daughter, Jessica, is stolen from him, a final insult that Topol says fuels his character’s cartoonish revenge.)

Playing opposite Topol is Alexandra Silber, whose mother is Catholic and whose late father was Jewish. In Our class, Silber plays a character who must convert to escape the Shoah. In Tradershe plays Portia, the avatar of Christian mercy (not tense), who forces Shylock to convert.

“It’s interesting being a real physical actor, who feels like I have both feet in both camps and cultures,” says Silber.

Silber, who played Tzeitel in the 2015 Broadway revival Fiddler on the roof (and wrote a novel about what happens to the characters when the curtain closes) says her Jewish grandparents rejected her mother. She is proudly Jewish, but is not always accepted by the community. She brings that friction to the role.

Amid the comedy, in which her Portia frantically tends to her suitors, Silber plays what she calls “the ugly,” challenging the assumption, already clouded by the Bard, that Jews are vengeful and Christians are uniquely forgiving.

At the same time, Silber believes Portia is like Shylock: disenfranchised, held captive by her father’s will and the bizarre stipulation that the man who marries her must choose one of three coffins, Monty Hall style.

“She has very little agency in her own life,” Silber said. “And interestingly enough, one of the most important tools she uses is against the other oppressed person.”

From Golyak Trader comes at a time when hate crimes against Jews are on the rise and many are reckoning with their identities and values ​​in the wake of Israel’s war with Hamas.

It will not be the first time that a play by Golyak has been tragically topical. His play in 2022 Witness on immigration and anti-Semitism, projected a live feed of the hostage situation at a synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, during a performance. Our class‘ first run at BAM went into rehearsal shortly after the October 7 attacks in Israel.

But Golyak’s goal is not to be a ‘message director’ who gives good answers to complex dilemmas. In his Trader, that means we should laugh first and ask questions later.

It is up to the audience to decide whether Shylock, who bends and plays out the stereotypes assigned to him by the gentiles, is really the villain or whether – as he says in his most famous speech – he has learned villainy from Christians, and the instruction only improves. .

That of William Shakespeare The Merchant of Venice begins performances on November 22 at Classic Stage Company in Manhattan and runs through December 22. Tickets and more information can be found here.