The Merchant of Venice (review)

Director Jeri Pitcher downplayed much of the racial tension that has imbued so many Merchant productions over the past half-century. Instead, she focused on the stubborn incongruities that stood between Antonio’s, Bassanio’s, Portia’s, and other characters’ substantial wealth and power and their stultified expressions of personal fulfillment. While Pitcher’s examination individualized possible pretexts for each character’s malaise, it more significantly emphasized some disturbing shortcomings among these men and women when faced with challenges to their privileged social place. These shortcomings, moreover, provided stark reflections on our own culture’s longstanding confusion of economic well-being with contentment, taste, and virtue, as well as on our recurrent impositions of ourselves upon other cultures.

Pitcher nuanced these reflections through her arrangement of set and design of costumes. Providing a first hint, perhaps, that wealth and power do not result necessarily in refinement or beauty, the structure dominating the rear portion of Cumston Hall’s two-tiered stage consisted merely of a railed staircase leading to a large platform slightly right of center. Constructed entirely of found items—slats, corrugated steel sheets, wire mesh, and plywood—this platform was adorned only by a pale blue paint, splashed haphazardly.

Contrasting vividly with this lifeless staging, the actors donned styles evocative of Kennedy-era America, including white gloves, fur-fringed coats, and ziberline dresses. At 3.4, for example, as Portia and Nerissa prepared for Venice, Nerissa appeared in a shell-pink skirt and matching jacket, simultaneously reminiscent of one of Jacqueline Kennedy’s most iconic ensembles and of a moment when much of the world welcomed American cultural influence. For the flash of an instant, in other words, Portia’s and Nerissa’s bold garments and confident responses to the challenge before them conjured fond memories of the Peace Corps, the Mercury and Gemini space missions, and other energetic American ventures introduced during the early 1960s.

These reminiscences proved anomalous, however, as other well placed props inaugurated a chilling contradistinction between one’s power and his or her treatment of others. While Lorenzo and his friends plotted his elopement with Jessica in 2.4, for instance, a radio broadcast Bill Mazeroski’s homerun that ended the 1960 World Series; and as the men schemed and bantered with the baseball chatter behind them, they quaffed beer straight from brown bottles and drunkenly strutted about the stage, behavior which not only foregrounded the less savory accoutrements of their affluence but also exacerbated the cruelty inherent in sentiments such as Lorenzo’s “never dare misfortune cross [ Jessica’s] foot, / Unless she do it under this excuse, / That she is issue to a faithless Jew.” The overweight and sloppily dressed Gratiano particularly evinced much of his class’s ethical vacuity as his uncouth behavior dominated this scene. The audience would later recall his vulgarity as he gloated over the “justice” administered to Shylock at the end of 4.1, despite his tidied appearance and quelled raucousness after meeting Nerissa in Belmont.

Such dissociations of privilege from benevolence or contentment informed the play from its opening moments. Performed in dumb show fashion, the opening scene featured impeccably dressed yet morose subjects (each clutched a palm leaf ) on their way to or from Sunday mass. Antonio, who wore an Italian-cut black suit jacket and tie, surrounded himself with several identically dressed yet noticeably younger men. As he spied Shylock needling through the crowd (he stood out from the others because of his yarmulke and older, less stylish clothing), Antonio’s sullenness turned to violence as he threatened the...