Sunday, August 1, 2010

Fortune made such havoc of my means

Every time I drive up to Utah (or back to California) in the summer or fall, I think maybe I'll stop in Cedar City and take in a Shakespeare play. But that's all I usually do: just think about it. The closer I get to Cedar City, the more I start thinking about how far I have yet to drive and how late it will be when I reach my destination, and the more I remember how USF prices have gone up and up in the last few years, so I usually just drive right through, with few regrets. But once, back in October 2006, I had one of those fortuitous intimations that happen all too seldom for my liking, so I decided to stop. The Merchant of Venice was playing, which sounded good to me since I hadn't seen a decent stage production of that play for some time, and as I approached the box office I passed some publicity photos. "Wait a sec," I thought. "Unless my eyes deceive me, that looks like Sara Kathryn Baker as Portia!" I bought my ticket (I was able to get a perfect location: third row center) and checked out the program: it was, indeed, SKB. I was excited about that, as she’s been one of my favorite Shakespearean actors (or actresses; I haven't decided yet what the proper usage is) ever since I saw her as Rosalind in As You Like It at USF in 2002. The best Rosalind I’ve ever seen. So I settled into my seat, thinking what a good thing it was I had listened to that inner voice that told me to stop and see a play.

The play began and ended with a sort of framing device where the actors came on stage in street clothes and a couple of them (the guys playing Shylock and Antonio, as I recall) pulled items – jackets, robes, hats, beards, etc – out of a couple of trunks that were there. At the end, after the dénouement at Portia’s house, the actor playing Shylock came back on stage, slowly, with a sad and mopy expression on his face, carrying the huge and ornate crucifix Antonio had given him earlier when he was told to convert to Christianity. He was soon followed by the other actors, and the actress (actor) who played Jessica helped him take off his Shylock costume and put it back in the trunk while the others watched (or didn’t – Bassanio and Portia were up on a higher level, a sort of arched walkway on the second floor, where they stood whispering to one another and pointing at something in the far distance – perhaps at some patron leaving before the play had officially ended). I thought to myself, “Well, so they’re not going to let the comic ending stand.”

I don’t think The Merchant of Venice can be done as a straight comedy anymore, not since the Holocaust, although I’ve heard some people say it should be. But I think they’re wrong. It’s not only obligatory to elicit sympathy for the character of Shylock, it’s necessary, and it’s not hard to do, since it’s there in the text. It’s important to perform this play because performing it gives the audience a chance to see how they feel about the issues brought out by the play. But I don’t like it when the sympathy gets heavy-handed or overbalanced, which usually happens by making the Christians out to be a pack of uniformly intolerant, hateful bigots. I saw it done that way once, and it becomes less the comedy of the Merchant of Venice, and more the Tragedy of Shylock, besides being a sort of a spontaneous abortion of what Shakespeare wrote. It just doesn’t work that way. It loses all its balance and becomes a piece of propaganda, just as it would if Shylock were to be portrayed as a stock comic villain instead of a multi-dimensional human being. I personally think Antonio (and some of his friends) is intolerant, bigoted, and hateful, an attitude especially manifest in his insistence that Shylock be made a Christian, but he does show some mercy by allowing Shylock to keep his fortune, even if he has to leave it to his Christian son-in-law at his death. (And it has been argued by some that Antonio thinks he’s doing a service to Shylock by making him convert. But let that go.)

But Portia is not like Antonio, or even like Shylock, who some people think is justified in his attempts to kill Antonio in a cruel and unusual manner. I have heard her criticized for being just as intolerant, bigoted, and hateful as the rest of the Christians because of her lack of mercy toward Shylock in the trial scene. That is madness. She gives Shylock three (3) opportunities to show mercy by taking the money instead of the pound of flesh, and one other chance to show charity by taking measures to preserve Antonio’s life. Shylock says “I crave the law, the penalty and forfeit of my bond”, and so, after his final demand for justice and the letter of the law, that’s what she gives him. Three (3) times she says he shall have justice and his bond, just as he demanded. Afterwards, she tells Shylock to ask mercy from the duke. Not only that, but she gives Antonio an opportunity to show mercy as well. So I don’t understand why people are so viciously critical of Portia. If regarded as a human being, she would have her faults and frailties, like all of us, but she would be one who tries to do what is best. (I sometimes wonder if the same people who condemn Portia for being unmerciful are the same ones who say they cannot understand why Hermione forgives Leontes.) If regarded as a character or a symbol, Portia is the one who most carefully juxtaposes the themes of justice and mercy: in the trial scene she mentions, by my rough count, “justice” eight times (and “law” in connection with justice five times), while she mentions “mercy” eight times (and “merciful” twice, and “charity” once, not counting her whole speech about mercy, and the pronoun “it” that refers to mercy, which overall far outweigh the occurrences of the word justice). And she is the one who asks if there is a balance present to weigh the flesh. I see Portia as symbolic of the balance who is there to weigh the humanity (flesh) of both Shylock and Antonio.

Sara Kathryn Bakker as Portia in the USF Merchant of Venice.
Photo from the USF website.

Anyway, all that aside, I saw the framing device as a rather heavy-handed way for the director to say “this is just a story, and the anti-Semitic expressions contained herein do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the actors or director”. It was interesting to see that the actors thought of the framing device as a method not of distancing themselves and the audience from the play (which is kind of how I saw it) but as a way of bringing the audience closer to the story; such was the comment of the moderator of the talk-back session. (After the play, there was a talk-back session for the benefit of the many junior high and high school students who had come to the performance that afternoon, and eight or ten of the actors, SKB among them, participated in it.) SKB reiterated the moderator’s comment about the framing device (a term that she did not use, by the way), saying it was meant to put the audience into the story. She used the example of the reaction of many of the students who laughed when Antonio said that Shylock should “presently become a Christian”. I was a little shocked that they would laugh at that, but they are young and callow. Anyway, SKB said that they had to somehow deal with the knowledge that they had laughed at that point, not saying whether it was a right or wrong reaction, but something that they had to examine within themselves, because the issues in the play are contemporary, not just applicable to the culture of late Elizabethan England.

But overall, I found the play to be mostly well-performed (I thought Lorenzo and Jessica were a little weakly conceived), and I thoroughly enjoyed SKB’s Portia. I’ve said before that SKB has a fantastic sense of timing and vocal nuance. While on stage she is always, but always, the character. (Jean Arthur was like that, too, and Greer Garson. And Rosalind Russell. And . . .) I found myself compelled to watch her, even when other characters were speaking, during the casket scenes as she watched the proceedings with evident anxiety and then relief. (And I must say here that the Prince of Aragon’s scene was especially hilarious.) She was particularly outstanding in 3.2. Her “You see me, Lord Bassanio, where I stand” speech was brilliant; one knew exactly what she was talking about and what her feelings were towards Bassanio and herself.

It was fascinating to watch her change, as she listened to Bassanio read Antonio’s letter, from her carefree, almost flippant, “What, no more?” comments about money, to her thoughtful (and, I think, a little worried at the thought that Antonio could be a serious rival for Bassanio’s affections – although there weren’t any homosexual tones at all to Bassanio’s performance, and just the merest hint of such from Antonio) and heartfelt “O, love!”, said – or rather, almost choked out – with tears in her eyes.

SKB’s portrayal of a learned doctor of law ranged from comical (trying to appear both confidently masculine and knowledgeable while being obviously unfamiliar with court procedure: not even knowing where to stand, and having to ask which one was the merchant and which the Jew, all while Antonio sat there chained in manacles and Shylock stood over him whetting a knife); to disappointed with Bassanio (“Your wife would give you little thanks for that”), and with Shylock after his many refusals of her offers to take the money or at least provide a surgeon to keep Antonio from bleeding to death; to a poignant combination of both humor and sadness (“I pray you know me when we meet again”). And then to the wounded disappointment of “It cannot be” when she received the ring she had given her husband. The ring joke at the end has always seemed a little mean to me, but they made it funny and inoffensive, and both Bassanio’s and Portia’s reactions were fitting. Overall, it was an enjoyable and rather good production of the play. I left thinking I might want to stop there in my travels again sometime.

1 comment:

Shannon said...

Well, hey, maybe we should go this summer and see Merchant of Venice...