A new production of “The Merchant of Venice,” which is set to open at the Classic Stage Company in Manhattan on Nov. 25, aims to connect the Jew-hatred that Shakespeare famously depicts in the late 16th-century play and antisemitism today.
“We are provoking the audience,” the play’s director Igor Golyak told JNS. “We are trying to figure out how much of the antisemitism still lives in us today. Hate lives in all of us, but it’s about how easily and when it wakes up and what we do with it.”
“That’s a question I struggle with and I hope the audience will struggle with me as well,” Golyak said.
In the play, which Shakespeare is thought to have composed in 1596 and 1597, Shylock, one of the most famous Jewish literary characters, lends money to the noble yet cash-strapped Venetian Bassanio on the condition that the loan’s backer, Antonio, repay him with a pound of flesh if the money cannot be repaid by a set date.
Scholars debate whether Shakespeare’s play is antisemitic or whether it is the opposite, particularly Shylock’s humanizing speech “Hath not a Jew eyes?”
Golyak opted to use masks in the show that relate directly to antisemitic stereotypes, including oversized noses.
“The way we are approaching ‘The Merchant of Venice’ is through the comedy that it was initially written as,” Richard Topol (Shylock) told JNS. “It’s a ‘Merchant of Venice’ like you’ve never seen before and never will see again. There is a lot of giddiness and playfulness.”
T.R. Knight (Antonio) told JNS that he wouldn’t have been interested in being a part of the play “without an approach like Igor’s.”
“I was very intrigued by and still am by Igor’s focus and creativity,” said the only non-Jew among the play’s main cast. “Specifically with his ability to take abhorrent subject matter and somehow translate it into images you can take in but won’t ever leave my brain.”
Actors in the play told JNS that their interpretation of their roles is shaped by a post-Oct. 7 world, including surging Jew-hatred.
“The things that happened to lead to Oct. 7 and what has happened since are complicated, but the simplest truth of the world we live in is people hate Jews because they are Jews,” Topol told JNS.
“That hate has been given permission to live more fully, so I think it’s important to stand up as a Jew and artistically push back against the notion that it’s OK for people to hate Jews because they are Jews,” he said. “I feel like every time that I do a play like this, I’m doing a mitzvah.”
“It’s more important than ever to do those mitzvahs after Oct. 7,” he added.
Alexandra Silber, who plays the wealthy heiress Portia who marries Bassanio, told JNS that she has rethought her Jewish identity in the aftermath of Hamas’s terror attacks.
“There have been periods in my life where my Jewishness has felt neutral or even a form of self-loathing,” she said. “Something I wanted to hide. That’s worthy of exploration, not shying away from the reality that, sometimes, our prejudice and hatred live within us.”
The play, which runs through Dec. 22, is Golyak’s second produced by the Needham, Mass.-based Arlekin Players Theatre.
“Our Class,” which was performed earlier this year at BAM Fisher’s Fishman Space, a Brooklyn theater, addressed the July 10, 1941 pogrom in the Polish town of Jedwabne during which hundreds of Jews were murdered.
