The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Shylock revisited in new “Merchant of Venice’
Comedy turns dark over collective greed
Just when director Karin Coonrod thought her family vacation in Hawaii couldn’t get any better, she received the email that shot her joys heavenward. Coonrod, who teaches directing at the Yale School of Drama, was gobsmacked to hear from her Yale colleague, David Kastan.
“How about doing ‘The Merchant of Venice’ in the Venice ghetto to mark the 500th anniversary of its founding?” said Coonrod. “I thought, wow!”
That was in 2014, and Coonrod sounds just as delighted to remount her production Tuesday through Saturday at Yale Law School Courtyard as part of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas.
“I’ve always been scared of ‘Merchant of Venice’ because of its incendiary reputation, and my family is Jewish,” said Coonrod, referring to the play’s anti-Semitic strain. “My husband is Jewish. So I was also scared from that.”
Like most artists, Coonrod used her apprehension to fuel her drive to stage a vibrant and clear production to explore the play’s depth and humanity. The 2016 production marks the 500th anniversary of the Jewish Ghetto as well as the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. All during her vacation in Hawaii, Coonrod’s mind zoomed toward Venice.
Coonrod, whose father is American
“I’ve always been scared of ‘Merchant of Venice’ because of its incendiary reputation, and my family is Jewish. My husband is Jewish. So I was also scared from that.”
Karin Coonrod, production director, referring to the play’s anti-Semitic strain.
and mother is a native of Florence, lived in Italy during her preschool years and subsequently returned often enough to whet her appetite for this project.
“It was, for the entire company, astonishing to be there at that moment, with all that history and knowing what happened there,” said Coonrod, who earned her MFA in directing from Columbia University. “We were there in 2016 before the election here, and workshopping it in 2015 as this whole immigration thing was becoming very urgent. In fact my assistant and I tried going over there early to prep for the play at the time of the Paris terrorist attack. My assistant came from Brussels right before that attack, so we were very aware of everything that was going on.”
Sweetening the pot more was the prospect of hosting a mock trial with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg included among the five presiding judges who would hear the cases for and against Portia (played by Linda Powell, Colin Powell’s daughter) and her father, Shylock, the most notorious character in Shakespeare’s play.
“I had a hunch that Shylock was not at all either the comic villain he had been for centuries before the Holocaust, or afterwards as the Tragic Hero,” she said. “I felt he was very human, problematic, driven by money. But beyond money, more characters in the play are driven by avarice, money and greed than is Shylock, actually. That’s why, after a deep reading of this play, and realizing that we’re going to confront the ghetto, I wanted to work with different Shylocks rather than someone famous playing Shylock. I wanted to open up the character to what is Jewish and universal. I wanted to explore the fluidity of identity, of The Other.”
In order to point up Shylock’s multiple facets, Coonrod cast five diverse actors to play Shylock in five scenes: Shylock as a businessman, father, mother, widower and killer. Coonrod’s “attempt to solve the problem of Shylock by multiplication is surprisingly effective,” wrote Ben Brantley of The New York Times in his review of the production last year in New Jersey.
Coonrod also starts the performance
with a prologue spoken in Italian by a commedia dell’arte-style clown. The device is two-fold, as the director explained.
“We wanted to start as a comedy because it is called a comedy,” Coonrod said. “It wants to be comedy until it does not. It goes completely off the rails. I like the extremes in our production.”
Starting the production off in such light-hearted fashion not only counterpoints the play’s escalating dramatic tension, but it also introduces the correct Venetian flavor to the play, being that commedia dell’arte’s roots are Italian.
“We wanted to get Venice into the production,” she said. “As artists, we want to bring the truth of grief and the truth of the joy and the comedy — the craziness.”
Coonrod’s approach to the play is anything but romantic and explores the flawed, human qualities of its characters, especially those of Shylock. The characters’ collective greed exceeds their capacity for love and empathy, Coonrod explained.
“These people want to win and they are interested in dominating,” she said. “Money is more important than anything else.”
Though the production’s roots are in 2014, Coonrod said that it resonates more and more with every subsequent production amid a country deeply divided by racism, provincialism and extremes.
“We’re still discovering new meaning in rehearsal this week,” said Coonrod, who will bring the production to Dartmouth College in July at the invitation of Suzanna Heschel, head of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth and daughter of esteemed the late Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel.
“This is the play of our time,” she said.