Review: The Shylock and the Shakespeareans

How it’s New York: Untitled Theater Company No. 61 is a New York Off-Broadway Theater Company.

How it’s (Irish) English: Shakespeare was English, and the problems of living as an immigrant in a not-altogether hospitable country are problems the Irish have faced.

How could Jessica do it?

It’s not the main question of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, but it is one that is going to bug any Jewish daughter. Shylock, the Jewish merchant in the title of Shakespeare’s play, is not only robbed of his money by Antonio; he’s also robbed of his dignity when his daughter Jessica elopes with young Lorenzo.

The play itself has a troubled history; beloved by antisemites and taken out of context for years, it is the source of the famous monologue:

Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? 

Despite Shakespeare’s dignifying the Jew with some humanity here, it’s a troubling play to perform, as the “happy ending” consists of Shylock’s conversion, and a trick put on by a crooked judge– a wealthy woman named  Portia– who has another famous speech which includes the line “The quality of mercy is not strain’d.”

In The Shylock and the Shakespeareans, playwright/director Edward Einhorn takes on these issues directly by envisioning a world in which a rabble-rouser named Shakespeare is out to raise passions against Jews and no doubt other immigrants. It’s one of Einhorn’s more delicious jokes that the word “Shakespearean” becomes a synonym for “prejudiced thug.”

It is not to be missed for any lovers of Shakespeare, of this play in particular, or for those interested in how a civilized society can so Other a group of people.

So what we’re looking at here is, yes, a retelling of The Merchant of Venice, but one in which Shylock is not made slightly more palatable than the Jew in Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, but one in which Shylock truly is the center of the story. And it is a story about the outsider.

Here, Jessica is not so much the duped brat that she seems in Shakespeare, but a young woman who is a pragmatist– she converts because since she doesn’t believe, she figures she may as well, and Lorenzo, her lover, is less of a gold-digger than he is usually portrayed, and more of another outsider.

In short, Einhorn’s play is a great answer to those who, when trying to deconstruct a Shakespeare play so it portrays the opposite intention from Shakespeare’s, are asked, “why don’t you write your own play?” It’s clear that Shakespeare thought the conversion of the Jew in the end was a happy ending, or happy enough for his audiences– though his humanizing of the character suggests at least some ambiguity.

Here it is very clear that forced assimilation is just another kind of violence.

The basic plot is the same (but remember, Shakesepeare himself rarely invented his plots): Antonio seeks a loan from moneylender Jacob (“Shylock” here is just a slur, not a name); Jacob lives in Venice’s Jewish ghetto with his daughter Jessica. Antonio wants the money for his friend Bassanio, who wishes to court the wealthy Portia, who moonlights as a judge, wearing men’s clothing. (Well, in Einhorn’s play she does; in Shakespeare she merely shows up as a judge when needed.) When Antonio’s ships, used as a surety for the loan, go missing, Jacob seeks his necklace back. (In the Shakespeare, he seeks a pound of flesh; here that is just a rumor that goes along with the one that Jews are cannibals.) In a subplot, Jacob’s daughter Jessica runs off with Lorenzo, and converts to Christianity. Justice is not really served, in either play, but the violence boils over in Einhorn’s play.

Einhorn uses contemporary language, and live musicians to cover scene changes. The play smartly raises questions about the ostraciziation of The Other: as Einhorn writes in the program, “Many people don’t realize that the Jewish star of the Nazi era had its precursor in the Italian yellow circle, and astonishingly even the blood libel has far from disappeared from the world.” The blood libel is that lie that Jews use the blood of Christian children when they bake Matzoh. (Fox newscasters have been known to use the term wrong.)

The play is interested in what it means to be Jewish, particularly for Jessica, an atheist. As Einhorn also points out, Shakespeare likely never met a Jew. His play gives the Shylock character back his centrality.

He has an able cast: playwright Jeremy Kareken plays Jacob with dignity and a general mild manner. The women particularly shine, with Yael Haskal as a winsome, sumpathetic Jessia, Nina Mann as an elegant, bigoted mainly because she’s never thought very deeply, Portia, and Stephanie Litchfield as Nerissa, Portia’s maid, giving Nerissa a little bit of class consciousness along with some bawdiness.

As a director, Einhorn paces the play so that it builds to an inevitable climax.

Though the play has closed at the New Ohio Theatre, it continues to be available On Demand through the weekend, Sunday, Aug. 6.

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