Peter Sellars, now in town directing The Merchant of Venice at the Goodman Theatre, is “daring,” “innovative,” “a genius,” and “brilliant,” according to critics from around the United States and Europe, who’ve hailed him as the most exciting thing to come down the artistic pike since Andy Warhol. He’s been the subject of an astounding number of newspaper and magazine articles, most of them unstinting in their admiration of his work, including a pair of recent puffs by the Tribune’s Sid Smith. Sellars’s official bio declares him to be “one of the foremost and most sought-after stage directors in the world today.”
A concept that might at first appear to work frequently unravels as the show progresses. For his production of Le nozze di Figaro Sellars substituted a Trump Tower penthouse for Beaumarchais’ Spanish castle, which might seem plausible until we’re confronted with Count Almaviva decked out in hunting drag–what’s he supposed to be stalking in Manhattan? Why should the modern pageboy Cherubino care when the Count threatens to send him off to the army given today’s all-volunteer military? Why couldn’t the contemporary Susanna simply threaten her lecherous boss with a sexual harassment suit? Even the most devoted admirers of the Sellars Tannhauser admitted that the spectacle of a Protestant fundamentalist stumbling off to seek a pardon from the pope–at the urging of fellow evangelists yet–strained credibility.
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Sellars has tried to justify some of his choices with a leftist-naive, good-guys-versus-bad-guys rhetoric that would have seemed simplistic back in the 1970s. This production of The Merchant of Venice, he solemnly informs us in the Goodman’s subscriber newsletter, is designed to expose “the economic roots of racism.” In a fawning interview conducted by his longtime friend and colleague Norman Frisch for the Goodman, Sellars intones, “This is the modern capitalist state. Shakespeare is present at the creation of the kind of hideous karma that we’re living with: the Gulf War, Rwanda, Bosnia. All of these borderlines were drawn by colonial powers.” The tribalism that has recently broken out is “karmic retribution” for the sins of capitalism. In his videotaped introduction to Le nozze di Figaro he tells us condescendingly, “The Count is way off balance. What can he do but, of course, begin to try and, of course, rape the servants. It’s the way most big nations act toward most small nations that happen to be nearby.” Sellars’s anticapitalist, anti-American interpretations were brought to you courtesy of Martin Marietta, Texaco, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the federal government through the National Endowment for the Arts, but he still seems to view himself as some kind of revolutionary. In an interview with Bill Moyers he declared, “In America you have to hit and run. As soon as they figure out what you’re doing, they take you out behind the barn and shoot you in the head. I mean, it’s just known. And so you have to move any way you can, and you have to use any strategy you can.”
Critics may like Sellars because they’re bored with the Same Old Thing. Few performable operas are being written these days, and even fewer survive past a first run: their value is all in their novelty. And most opera companies, dependent on satisfied customers, tend to program the classic operas most people want to hear–an endless round of Madama Butterfly, Tosca, Carmen, Rigoletto, etc that leaves the eyes of critics glazed. (Germany has the opposite problem: a lot of opera companies and, historically at least, a surfeit of government funding, along with a corresponding lack of need to satisfy anyone but the apparatchiks.) Sellars offers a different take, a pinch of novelty, along with a great line of hype.
Sellars has promised that he’s done with old works and will henceforth present only genuinely new shows. But his work on John Adams’s Nixon in China elicited as many yawns as plaudits, and The Death of Klinghoffer was termed “a kind of four-ring circus” by the Economist and indignantly panned by Manuela Holterhoff of the Wall Street Journal for putting victims and terrorists on the same moral ground. And now here he is at the Goodman doing another old work, The Merchant of Venice.
