The Muzak of Venice
BERMEL, ALBERT
On Stage THE MUZAK OF VENICE BY ALBERT BERMEL In the Ellis Rabb production of The Merchant of Venice, which recently finished a limited run at the Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater,...
...During Antonio's trial Portia—now a lawyer —realizes that she is odd girl out in a polysexual triangle...
...It is the two big roles, however...
...instead, it punishes them...
...Antonio deliberately gambles with his life when he asks Shylock for a loan...
...from her inheritance he has hopes of making it back among the rich...
...They are rogues (Bassanio, Lorenzo) or victims (Antonio, Shy-lock, Jessica, Portia...
...The plot's imperatives transcend common sense...
...Why do Bassanio and Antonio borrow from their enemy, their only enemy in Venice...
...During his years with the APA Company—and under Rabb's direction—Walker did sterling work in Ghelderode's Pantagleize and Mo-liere's Scapin...
...I suspect Rabb came by his interpretation when he began to confront Act V, which, as with certain other last acts of Shakespeare, appears to be an ornament dangling off the end of the play...
...Still, in theme and spirit, as well as story, it does not belong to what has gone before...
...The law, his only safeguard in a hostile city, is turned against him by verbal trickery...
...After a performance like Frederick's Valk's a few years ago—or, by all accounts, Henry Irving's?while the fifth act goes its merry way we are haunted by, and perhaps still weeping over, the simplicity of Shylock's last lines: "I pray you give me leave to go from hence./I am not well...
...Thus those old standbys of modernity, drinks and cigarette smoke, drench the scene, as does incidental Muzak?a dab of jazz here, a few bars of WQXR programming there...
...Finally, he "must presently become a Christian...
...Mercantile Venice can be updated...
...Here Rabb takes as his epigraph a quotation from Nerissa: "They are as sick that surfeit with too much as they that starve with nothing...
...1 for one looked forward to seeing him land a juicy part at the Beaumont...
...Bassanio throws back a look that says something like, "Sorry, old man...
...Rabb's characters behave consistently, from understandable motives...
...In anger she turns the verdict against the plaintiff, reasonable Signor Shylock, and embarrasses her spouse by wheedling back the ring she gave him earlier as a love token, in order to sneer to her confidante Nerissa that he actually offered it to her while she was disguised as a man...
...Thus far, Rabb is trading directly off Shakespeare...
...In this production she has mostly one mood to portray—petulance—and she simply cannot stretch it enough to enfold Portia's bewildering personality...
...An actor can make a spectacular contribution in this role even if he has to juggle with beachballs, so long as he can enter Shylock's head, heart and vitality...
...In either case they exercise little choice: Money has them by the short hairs...
...Shylock happens to be Jewish by origin...
...The most sensitive person in the Anti-Defamation League could not take offense at this dry-cleaned, parboiled sample of civic rectitude...
...she confirmed her abundant gifts only last year in Pinter's Old Times...
...Shylock would not have let go ot the turquoise ring he had from his Leah for a wilderness of monkeys...
...And since Shylock is a pawn in the remade story, it makes little difference whether he appears "Jewish," for the issue is sexuality, not religious persecution...
...it sounds philosophical and wise but illuminates nothing and reduces a complex of relationships to drivel...
...Walker does succeed in hinting at the inner truth of Shylock, thereby lifting the performance out of its lethargic rut, when Portia tells him to beg for mercy from the Duke: He lets his hands go to his thighs and silently pushing at them, giving his agony a physical statement, he forces his knees to unlock and lower him to the ground...
...Rabb's solution is to provide an Act V that does not reward the characters and straighten out their lives...
...No finer actress than Rosemary Harris exists in the English-speaking theater...
...If I'd known you were going to be flush again I'd never have pushed us into this mess...
...The trouble is Shakespeare's plays don't work by that sort of logic...
...We will observe its predators fashion-parading in their blazers and white suits and costly gowns as the taste of la dolce vita turns sour on their tongues...
...It wraps up the action...
...Other minor innovations of Rabb's are less justified by the text and have to be sustained by filling silences with significant glances and gestures...
...No sooner has Bassanio won Portia than he disappears to be with Antonio, who has defaulted on the loan and is resigned to paying Shy-lock's fleshly interest...
...Very crisp...
...As Gratiano, Philip Bosco transmits some inner fire, though his gallant efforts make him appear out of place, a visitor from another play...
...The happy resolution is immeasurably more gruesome than Rabb's soulful, wistful closing notes, especially if we keep being reminded of how lightly Bassanio parted with Portia's ring (a symbol if there ever was one...
...In our imaginations, fortified by James Til-ton's slide-projected backdrops and his abstract Romanesque arches in gold wire, we see these Venetians...
...that are most hobbled...
...For instance, the clown Launcelot Gobbo plays footsie with Jessica, Shylock's daughter, and makes her boyfriend Lorenzo jealous...
...They help Jessica to run away from her father before he has brought Antonio to trial...
...At the end of the play Antonio, as melancholy as ever, even though his ships are "safely come to road," watches Bassanio being haled off to bed by Portia...
...What Rabb has done is to forestall charges that Shakespeare is an anti-Semite by denaturing Shylock...
...The play has to be forced to stay alive...
...The characters run theatrical risks, confident that they can play themselves into convincing embodiments of human beings...
...Punishes them for what...
...His characters have enigmatic motives...
...On Stage THE MUZAK OF VENICE BY ALBERT BERMEL In the Ellis Rabb production of The Merchant of Venice, which recently finished a limited run at the Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater, Antonio and Bassanio are lovers and hobnob homosexually with Gratiano and "Salarino"—a character pieced together out of Sa-lerio and Solanio...
...And topical, if not timeless...
...That is the miracle of the play...
...It is always a mistake for a director (or critic) to ask what a play is "about...
...One must cope with the absence of Shylock...
...Antonio knows not why he is so sad but gives the impression that he fears losing Bassanio...
...Antonio (Josef Sommer) looks dazed by sunstroke and liquor...
...it has some gorgeous poetry...
...Between them they secure 3,000 ducats from Shylock, a handsomely tailored aristocrat with r> clipped voice and an emotional mask of a face...
...the sick-rich, killing time and their souls...
...Purists may argue that he makes too much of the Elizabethan word "love" which, exchanged by men, implies affectionate, fraternal respect (similar to the Greek philia), not eroticism...
...he now needs a hefty loan so that he can shift into hetero competition with the suitors of Portia...
...among other shows...
...Bassanio (Christopher Walken) has only to stir three paces or utter five words and he provokes our indifference...
...He inevitably comes up with some glib banality like "the corruption of love by money...
...In Rabb's staging the slouchy, disgruntled, hands-in-pockets acting invites questions and lets them flourish...
...Nerissa (Olivia Cole), as befits the character who has furnished the play's "meaning," stands icily detached from the activity, the better to model her costumes...
...In this theatrical twilight a great character evaporates...
...Shylock's incandescent words sound peculiar and studied coming from a stuffed shirt, but when they pour hot out of the mouth of a tormented caricature in long curls and "Jewish gaberdine...
...Portia's and Shylock's...
...Shylock gambles with his ducats when he accedes...
...Yet Antonio does extend himself to the limit on his friend's behalf, and the three men in the comedy who end up with women do seem to find them appealing when in drag...
...In a hard-driving performance these questions do not arise...
...But he wrote the most effective demonstration ever of anti-Semitism in action...
...He is stripped of his property...
...The fear will prove well-founded...
...In the modernized, Muzak-ridden Venice of Rabb's contrivance a pious Jew could indeed pass for just another sober citizen...
...The question to deal with is: "What happens...
...From her eyes he has received "fair speechless messages...
...Send the deed after me,/And I will sign it...
...But they are the least of his handicaps...
...I have no idea whether Shakespeare was an anti-Semite, and certainly his Shylock is anything but a virtuous, agreeable, or admirable portrait...
...He would now have had exactly that if the juice had not been drained out beforehand...
...and that other oppressed minority, homosexuals, is crudely equated with decadence...
...they transform him...
...Bassanio has scuttled his own wealth and some of Antonio's on high living...
...SYdney Walker's Shylock has to carry two inhibitory props through his scenes, a walking stick and a gray homburg that matches his suit...
...Lorenzo drools over the casket of gold stolen from Shylock, rather than over Jessica...
...Antonio's assets are at sea, but he puts his credit and a pound of flesh on the line for his more-than-friend...
...They then break his pride by relentless stages...
...In The Merchant of Venice a group of well-meaning, decent people who speak highly of each other and are terribly concerned with justice and kindness crucify an outsider...
...while Jessica grimaces to suggest that she, like Portia, has surrendered to a sweet-talking fortune-hunter...
...In a program note he adds that The Merchant is "about the corruption of love by money...
...Portia gambles that nobody will unmask her as an impostor who by chance knows the law better than lawyers...
...Why does Portia preach mercy and show Shylock none...
Vol. 56 • April 1973 • No. 8
