THE MERCHANT OF VENICE
Turning the sprawling Goodman stage into a TV studio, nearly bare except for a few set pieces and a plethora of video monitors (the empty space’s hugeness is emphasized by the long, looming shadows James F. Ingalls’s lighting casts on the vast white backdrop), Sellars resets Shakespeare’s story from Renaissance Italy to present-day California. The Jewish moneylender Shylock, the play’s most challenging and compelling character–a compendium of wounded vulnerability, caustic wit, and vicious anti-Semitic stereotypes about ritual murder and coldhearted usury, who’s been variously depicted as melodramatic monster, eccentric clown, noble hero, and fanatic madman–is played by African American actor Paul Butler as an impassive, conservatively dressed businessman. His punk-chic daughter, Jessica, spends her days indolently watching cartoons on the tube.
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Portia’s test, which famously proves “all that glisters is not gold” when two suitors pass over a simple lead casket in favor of gold and silver ones, historically has illustrated the theme of choosing values of lasting worth–life and love–over material wealth. That theme also shapes the play’s main conflict: Shylock’s insistence on claiming the pound of flesh pledged to him by his debtor Antonio. Here, love and money are linked to death. Portia’s caskets are coffins whose mirrored interiors reflect the faces of her disappointed suitors. (Freud might be an influence here, in his essay linking Merchant to the mythical judgment of Paris as an allegory for mortality.) This reminds us of the fatal implication of Shylock’s claim, especially when a palpably angry Portia veers back and forth between helping Antonio–her boyfriend’s boyfriend–or letting him die at Shylock’s hand.
