82 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY28, 2022
THETHEATRE
FINE PRINT
“The Merchant of Venice” and “Wolf Play” expose legal fictions.BY VINSONCUNNINGHAM
ILLUSTRATION BY KATI SZILÁGYI
T
he actor John Douglas Thompson,
now legendary among theatre au-
diences for his interpretations of classi-
cal material, is his own philharmonic of
well-tuned instruments. His voice, at a
rumble or a rasp, glides from line to line
and feeling to feeling—he turns Shake-
speare’s flurries and puzzles of language
into seemingly inevitable verbal out-
pourings of unknowable internal pro-
cesses. His face, similarly, is a map of
emotions. Before he speaks, his brows
churn and his mouth searches. What-
ever he says next has been looked for
and, somewhere deep in the soul, found.
But, in a new production of “The
Merchant of Venice” (directed by Arin
Arbus and produced by the Shakespeare
Theatre Company and Theatre for a
New Audience, at the Polonsky Shake-
speare Center), what I noticed most about
Thompson, who plays Shylock, was the
dense force with which he moves—or,
equally affectingly, doesn’t move. He’s an
imposing man, with the bulky grace of
Rodin’s “Adam,” and when he walks his
legs are slightly bowed. When he stands
stock still, it’s hard to imagine knocking
him even an inch off his spot, even in
moments of unbearable emotion. Some
actors are grounded; this guy is rooted.
That’s a fine undercurrent for Shylock,
who, God knows, needs all the deep im-
movability he can muster.In Arbus’s revisionist interpretation,
Shylock is a man of high principle and
long memory. A member of a perse-
cuted religious minority in a multicul-
tural yet vehemently anti-Semitic and
racist polity, he’s a realist when it comes
to his place in society, but also a kind of
judicial-procedural optimist: he really
thinks that the law, rightly divided, will
come to his aid if he’s in the right. All
he has to do is get the proper contract
signed, then stand tall.
When the merchant of the title, An-
tonio (Alfredo Narciso), comes to Shy-
lock looking for a loan—his friend Bas-
sanio needs some quick cash, the better
to woo the highborn Portia (Isabel Ar-
raiza)—you can see Thompson’s body
start to ease. Even as Antonio refuses to
shake hands to seal the deal—Antonio,
putatively the hero of Shakespeare’s com-
edy, is, in this version, at once an enamored
friend and erstwhile lover of Bassanio,
and, to Shylock, a bigoted prick—Shy-
lock knows, or, as it turns out, thinks he
knows, that momentary circumstances
and the eternal verities of the law have
conspired to give him an opportunity.
All he wants, if the deal goes sour, is a
pound of flesh. He figures he’ll get it.
The familiar story plays out against
a stark, solid-looking background: there
are three huge steps, pushed far upstage,
and at the top of them a pair of doors,
which lead into an edifice that looms
hugely and, like the steps, looks to be
made of stone. It suggests antiquity even
as the modern dress of the actors tries
to drag “Merchant” into the present day.
The result is a swirling temporal mish-
mash: nothing else seems quite as real
as Shylock.
If any of the other characters man-
ages to come close to Shylock’s round-
ness and reality, it’s Arraiza’s Portia. One
of the silliest aspects of “Merchant” is
the game that Portia’s suitors have to
play to win her hand: her late father has
left behind three “caskets”—one gold,
one silver, one lead—and the man who
picks the one that contains her picture
gets to marry her. Arraiza survives these
scenes admirably, retaining enough wit
and humanity to pull off the later plot
in which Portia disguises herself as a
young legal whiz who perverts the law
just enough to bring Shylock, at last, to
his knees. Arraiza plays those moments
John Douglas Thompson’s Shylock is a man of high principle and long memory. doubly, summoning cruel logical energy