even as her face and her bearing betray
a horrified empathy for Shylock.
Portia’s dawning realization is evident
in the way that Arraiza handles Shake-
speare’s language. For much of her time
onstage, she speaks with a clipped mod-
ern cadence, downplaying the poetry of
the iambic pentameter in favor of the
plainer rhythms of each sentence. But,
beginning with the famous “quality of
mercy” courtroom speech—“The qual-
ity of mercy is not strained./ It droppeth
as the gentle rain from heaven / Upon
the place beneath. It is twice blest: / It
blesseth him that gives and him that
takes”—she starts to emphasize the wave-
like music of the lines. By the end, this
newly bold Portia, empowered by im-
posture, is more singer than speaker.
Pop-cultural awareness can be a curse,
and I have to admit that while I watched
Thompson—a Black man taking on the
role of a Jewish moneylender—my
thoughts often strayed to, of all people,
Whoopi Goldberg. She was recently sus-
pended from “The View,” which she co-
hosts, because of an on-air conversation
in which she insisted, misguidedly, that
the Holocaust had nothing to do with
race but, rather, with “man’s inhumanity
to man.” Part of the effect of a Black
Shylock, marked not only by his velvet
kippah but by the color of his skin, is to
emphasize his utter insolubility in the
wider society. (This production features
other Black actors who are not, in the
world of the show, Jewish.) For Shylock,
and for his daughter, Jessica (Danaya Es-
peranza)—who has eloped with Lorenzo,
a friend of Antonio—no simple trick of
costume or marital custom will erase the
fact of their difference.
This is crucial to the dark magic of
race-making: those interested in the ar-
chitecture of exclusion—and, ultimately,
in the atmosphere of death that such
exclusion takes as its necessary tribute—
are always finding new specifics, phre-
nological or coloristic, on which to hang
their terrible claims. Perhaps that’s why
Thompson insists on an odd restraint
at the climax of the play. When Shylock
learns of Jessica’s elopement—and of her
absconding with many of his prize jew-
els—he emotes wildly, shouting reso-
lutely and dissolving into wheezing tears.
He’s been informed by his fellow-Jew
Tubal (Maurice Jones), and therefore
feels free to let loose in mourning “my
ducats, and my daughter.” But among
the Gentiles, where he depends not on
ethnic brotherhood but on the false shel-
ter of the law, he holds back. Thomp-
son delivers even the great Shylock
speech—“I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew
eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, di-
mensions, senses, affections, passions?”—
with the kind of steady wariness that
one reserves for mixed company.
Shylock is standing on the law, a field
that, in our time, is troubled by the cul-
ture wars surrounding critical race the-
ory, the much distorted body of aca-
demic thought whose key insight is, in
this production, clear as day: the judi-
ciary is all well and good, until you fig-
ure out that the fix is in.“
W
olf Play,” a smart, sweet, sad new
play by Hansol Jung, at SoHo
Rep, is similarly fixated on legal and
theatrical fictions. It starts off specula-
tively: a performer called Wolf (Mitch-
ell Winter) pops onto a stage overhung
with pulleys and sandbags, reminiscent
of a Rube Goldberg machine still under
construction. He teases and cajoles the
audience, asking a series of questions that
frame the story to come: “What if I said
I am not what you think you see? I am
not an actor human, this floor is forest
earth, and to the left of that glaring exit
light, a river flows, the width and length
and velocity of the Egyptian Nile.”
This abstract speculation gives way
to a concrete tale. Wolf handles a pup-
pet that represents a boy named Jeenu,
who was adopted as a small child and
has essentially been sold, through a
Yahoo message board, by his first adop-
tive family to another. All that makes
the exchange real is a power-of-attor-
ney contract and a heartless-sounding
“affidavit of waiver of interest in child.”
Jeenu’s new parents are Robin (Nicole
Villamil) and Ash (Esco Jouléy, a lovely
study in subtle movement), a queer cou-
ple into whose already strained relation-
ship the troubled kid drops like a bomb.
The play’s sometimes painful suspense
hangs on whether these structures—legal
and loving—can withstand an external
onslaught, embodied by Jeenu’s former
adoptive father, Peter (Aubie Merrylees),
and Robin’s brother, Ryan (Brandon Men-
dez Homer). What if I said that that
question haunts us all? And what if I said
that the answer, all too often, is no? PRESENTS
A Film by
Martin Strange-HansenWatch at
newyorker.com/videoBest LiveAction ShortAcademy Award® Nominee