Merchant of Venice Takes Risks, Sees Rich Rewards
Antonio (Mark Chamberlin) and Shylock (Charles Leggett) in Seattle Shakespeare Company's The Merchant of Venice. Photo: Ken Holmes.
Seattle Shakespeare Company's production of The Merchant of Venice (through April 5, tickets $30-$36 and student/senior rates) is startlingly good. The company in general swings for the fences, with hits and misses, but when they are good it is usually because they have found good company.
Here the creative talent includes director John Langs (who staged a "must-see" The Adding Machine last year); atypically restrained but multi-functional sets by Jennifer Zeyl, stirring music by John Osebold, and a cast that includes Klea Scott, Charles Leggett, Mark Chamberlin, and Will Beinbrink.
It may be making a virtue of necessity to place so much faith in the power of actors to inhabit and define a space sheerly by their presence, but it works. Zeyl's set does the minimum it needs to, suggesting silvery corporate hallways (lighting is by Geoff Korf), or a villa's garden. More to the point, it shapes movement, contrasting angular paths with openness.
Director Langs quickly updates the action in Venice to a modern, power-brokers-in-suits playground (a horde of them shouting "Buy!" and "Sell!" frenetically), and then contents himself with keeping you seamlessly immersed in the action, until the final minute, when you find yourself hoping vainly for an extra undiscovered act so you don't have to leave just yet.
Watching the conflict between two men of faith--the well-to-do, cross-necklaced Antonio of Mark Chamberlin and bankerly, yarmulke'd Shylock of Charles Leggett--you are confronted by the sight of two strong, competent men infected with a poisonous certainty that the law is on their side.
Antonio's brand of fervent Christianity requires a "loathsome" Jew; otherwise the religiosity of his love for the intrepid young Bassanio (Will Beinbrink, smartly obscuring his self-interest with a Gavin Newsom grin), who comes to him asking for help doubling down on a business loss, might be grounds for raised eyebrows in the venture capitalist locker room. (His disgust at usury is tricky to play today, as the British have long since accommodated themselves to loans with interest; they have been less successful, according to Philip Roth, with letting go of antisemitism.)
Portia (Klea Scott) and Bassanio (Will Beinbrink) in Seattle Shakespeare Company's The Merchant of Venice. Photo: Ken Holmes.
Shylock is all-too-aware that he's mimicking his persecutors, but he is unmoved by reason. His hatred for Antonio becomes sadism, the mirror of Antonio's masochism. Charles Leggett's Shylock is astounding, as he gradually narrows an urbane, thoughtful man's worldview down to a knife's width. He distinguishes the inhuman (as Shylock is seen) from the inhumane (Shylock's hair-raising fury, which none of his moral judges dares to empathize with).
And then there is Portia (Klea Scott, Frank Black's protege on Millennium, for those of you with nothing better to do on Friday nights in the late '90s). Introduced as a spoiled rich girl, through the trials of her comically self-involved suitors (Troy Fischnaller and Brian Claudio Smith as princes of Morocco and Aragon, respectively) she becomes an astute judge of character. Scott has the looks of an ingenue, but also a steely appraisal that comes in handy when Shakespeare ships her character off to judge, disguised, the dispute between Antonio and Shylock.
There is the law, there is justice, and, says Shakespeare through Portia, there is mercy--before polishing Shylock off with good old-fashioned retribution, and leaving us to ask if we can afford, ever, to be happy with that.
