The actor John Douglas Thompson, now legendary among theatre audiences for his interpretations of classical material, is his own philharmonic of well-tuned instruments. His voice, at a rumble or a rasp, glides from line to line and feeling to feeling—he turns Shakespeare’s flurries and puzzles of language into seemingly inevitable verbal outpourings of unknowable internal processes. His face, similarly, is a map of emotions. Before he speaks, his brows churn and his mouth searches. Whatever he says next has been looked for and, somewhere deep in the soul, found.
But, in a new production of “The Merchant of Venice” (directed by Arin Arbus and produced by the Shakespeare Theatre Company and Theatre for a New Audience, at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center), what I noticed most about Thompson, who plays Shylock, was the dense force with which he moves—or, equally affectingly, doesn’t move. He’s an imposing man, with the bulky grace of Rodin’s “Adam,” and when he walks his legs are slightly bowed. When he stands stock still, it’s hard to imagine knocking him even an inch off his spot, even in moments of unbearable emotion. Some actors are grounded; this guy is rooted. That’s a fine undercurrent for Shylock, who, God knows, needs all the deep immovability he can muster.
In Arbus’s revisionist interpretation, Shylock is a man of high principle and long memory. A member of a persecuted religious minority in a multicultural yet vehemently anti-Semitic and racist polity, he’s a realist when it comes to his place in society, but also a kind of judicial-procedural optimist: he really thinks that the law, rightly divided, will come to his aid if he’s in the right. All he has to do is get the proper contract signed, then stand tall.
When the merchant of the title, Antonio (Alfredo Narciso), comes to Shylock looking for a loan—his friend Bassanio needs some quick cash, the better to woo the highborn Portia (Isabel Arraiza)—you can see Thompson’s body start to ease. Even as Antonio refuses to shake hands to seal the deal—Antonio, putatively the hero of Shakespeare’s comedy, is, in this version, at once an enamored friend and erstwhile lover of Bassanio, and, to Shylock, a bigoted prick—Shylock knows, or, as it turns out, thinks he knows, that momentary circumstances and the eternal verities of the law have conspired to give him an opportunity. All he wants, if the deal goes sour, is a pound of flesh. He figures he’ll get it.
The familiar story plays out against a stark, solid-looking background: there are three huge steps, pushed far upstage, and at the top of them a pair of doors, which lead into an edifice that looms hugely and, like the steps, looks to be made of stone. It suggests antiquity even as the modern dress of the actors tries to drag “Merchant” into the present day. The result is a swirling temporal mishmash: nothing else seems quite as real as Shylock.
If any of the other characters manages to come close to Shylock’s roundness and reality, it’s Arraiza’s Portia. One of the silliest aspects of “Merchant” is the game that Portia’s suitors have to play to win her hand: her late father has left behind three “caskets”—one gold, one silver, one lead—and the man who picks the one that contains her picture gets to marry her. Arraiza survives these scenes admirably, retaining enough wit and humanity to pull off the later plot in which Portia disguises herself as a young legal whiz who perverts the law just enough to bring Shylock, at last, to his knees. Arraiza plays those moments doubly, summoning cruel logical energy even as her face and her bearing betray a horrified empathy for Shylock.
Portia’s dawning realization is evident in the way that Arraiza handles Shakespeare’s language. For much of her time onstage, she speaks with a clipped modern cadence, downplaying the poetry of the iambic pentameter in favor of the plainer rhythms of each sentence. But, beginning with the famous “quality of mercy” courtroom speech—“The quality of mercy is not strained. / It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven / Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest: / It blesseth him that gives and him that takes”—she starts to emphasize the wavelike music of the lines. By the end, this newly bold Portia, empowered by imposture, is more singer than speaker.
Pop-cultural awareness can be a curse, and I have to admit that while I watched Thompson—a Black man taking on the role of a Jewish moneylender—my thoughts often strayed to, of all people, Whoopi Goldberg. She was recently suspended from “The View,” which she co-hosts, because of an on-air conversation in which she insisted, misguidedly, that the Holocaust had nothing to do with race but, rather, with “man’s inhumanity to man.” Part of the effect of a Black Shylock, marked not only by his velvet kippah but by the color of his skin, is to emphasize his utter insolubility in the wider society. (This production features other Black actors who are not, in the world of the show, Jewish.) For Shylock, and for his daughter, Jessica (Danaya Esperanza)—who has eloped with Lorenzo, a friend of Antonio—no simple trick of costume or marital custom will erase the fact of their difference.
This is crucial to the dark magic of race-making: those interested in the architecture of exclusion—and, ultimately, in the atmosphere of death that such exclusion takes as its necessary tribute—are always finding new specifics, phrenological or coloristic, on which to hang their terrible claims. Perhaps that’s why Thompson insists on an odd restraint at the climax of the play. When Shylock learns of Jessica’s elopement—and of her absconding with many of his prize jewels—he emotes wildly, shouting resolutely and dissolving into wheezing tears. He’s been informed by his fellow-Jew Tubal (Maurice Jones), and therefore feels free to let loose in mourning “my ducats, and my daughter.” But among the Gentiles, where he depends not on ethnic brotherhood but on the false shelter of the law, he holds back. Thompson delivers even the great Shylock speech—“I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?”—with the kind of steady wariness that one reserves for mixed company.
“Wolf Play,” a smart, sweet, sad new play by Hansol Jung, at SoHo Rep, is similarly fixated on legal and theatrical fictions. It starts off speculatively: a performer called Wolf (Mitchell Winter) pops onto a stage overhung with pulleys and sandbags, reminiscent of a Rube Goldberg machine still under construction. He teases and cajoles the audience, asking a series of questions that frame the story to come: “What if I said I am not what you think you see? I am not an actor human, this floor is forest earth, and to the left of that glaring exit light, a river flows, the width and length and velocity of the Egyptian Nile.”
This abstract speculation gives way to a concrete tale. Wolf handles a puppet that represents a boy named Jeenu, who was adopted as a small child and has essentially been sold, through a Yahoo message board, by his first adoptive family to another. All that makes the exchange real is a power-of-attorney contract and a heartless-sounding “affidavit of waiver of interest in child.” Jeenu’s new parents are Robin (Nicole Villamil) and Ash (Esco Jouléy, a lovely study in subtle movement), a queer couple into whose already strained relationship the troubled kid drops like a bomb.
The play’s sometimes painful suspense hangs on whether these structures—legal and loving—can withstand an external onslaught, embodied by Jeenu’s former adoptive father, Peter (Aubie Merrylees), and Robin’s brother, Ryan (Brandon Mendez Homer). What if I said that that question haunts us all? And what if I said that the answer, all too often, is no? ♦
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