Grove’s Shylock Faces Many Judges : Stage: Festival’s first-ever production of ‘Merchant of Venice’ gets different reactions from Jews and non-Jews. Some are uplifted; others are disappointed.

GARDEN GROVE —  Thursday, the night before its first-ever production of “The Merchant of Venice” opened, the Grove Shakespeare Festival was preparing for two exacting trials. On stage, Shylock the Jew would, as expected, be found guilty of attempted murder of a Christian, forced to forfeit all his goods and ordered to convert to Christianity.

More in doubt was the verdict on the production itself: Had director Thomas F. Bradac brought to light the troubling social implications and complex human motivations in one of Shakespeare’s most controversial plays? Or had the Grove trivialized or even justified anti-Semitism, reincarnating a Shylock whose cruelty, greed and vengefulness were solely a product of his being Jewish?

The question was more than an incidental one for the Grove, which had undertaken to produce the play with the advice and assistance of the local Jewish community, even inviting members of the Orange County Board of Rabbis to attend Thursday’s preview performance (the play officially opened Friday night and will be reviewed in Monday’s Calendar). The theater had assembled a committee of educators and leaders of Jewish organizations to meet with the production staff during the play’s preparation and, before Thursday’s preview, presented an hourlong forum on “Merchant” for audience members who came early.

The play depicts a Venice populated by cheery Christians who share a common hatred and contempt for Jews. The title character, Antonio, falls short of cash and, reluctantly, turns to the Shylock he has long scorned, seeking a loan. The moneylender, who vents his hatred of Christians in frequent asides to the audience, offers a “merry bond” to the merchant: he will forgo his usual interest charge but will be entitled to a pound of Antonio’s flesh if he defaults on the loan.

After Shylock’s daughter elopes with a Christian and Antonio fails to pay his debt, an enraged Shylock, intent on exacting revenge on all Christians, seeks to carve his due from Antonio’s breast. Through a legal loophole employed by Portia, the play’s heroine, Shylock is put on trial and loses everything to the jeers of his Christian antagonists.

For centuries, Shylock was perhaps the best-known Jewish character in English literature, and his depiction as a malevolent, even demonic, miser has long troubled Jews and others concerned with ethnic stereotypes.

Yet Shylock is given some of Shakespeare’s most memorable words, justifying his severe position to the Christians who have cursed and hated him because, “I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with same weapons. . . . If you prick us, do we not bleed?” he continues, arguing that Jews are no different than anyone else in their desires and motivations.

The Thursday forum offered Bradac a rare chance for a director to tell an audience exactly what he wanted to accomplish in his production.

“The point of the play,” he told the 50-odd theatergoers who attended the forum, “is that intolerance breeds intolerance. We see in the play that Antonio, a good man in almost every other way, has this racism against this man called Shylock.”

As a result, Bradac said, “Shylock says that he hates Antonio because of what Antonio has done to him.”

Bradac recalled that as a young teen-ager, the “humanity” of the play and the honesty of the emotions it raised in Shylock had “turned me on to Shakespeare,” eventually leading him to found the Grove festival in 1979.

But a measure of the depth of feeling the play evokes came from Rabbi Allen Krause of Temple Beth El in Mission Viejo.

“I read that play in high school too,” Krause said, “and I came away thinking Shakespeare was scum.” A later English course in college led Krause to raise his opinion of the Bard, but to this day, he said, “The Merchant of Venice” remains a troubling and difficult work.

His views were echoed by panelist Bill Purkiss, a theater instructor who mounted a student production of “Merchant” at Orange Coast College in 1987.

Purkiss took issue with Bradac and others who praised the brilliance of the work.

“I see ‘Merchant of Venice’ not as a classic, but as a seedy little play in the back streets of a dirty city called Venice. I don’t see Antonio as an otherwise good man; I see him as a person who is, underlyingly, terribly, terribly vicious. And I see the other characters in the play very definitely affected by the ugly aspects of capitalism and the world they are surrounded in at that point in time.”

Purkiss said he saw “Merchant” as a documentation of anti-Semitism and produced it at OCC in order to teach students about the dangers of prejudice. He said that given the oppressive social order of Renaissance Europe, which barred Jews from most occupations and left them only with work that Christians refused to do, Shylock had to be considered a victim who struck back against injustice.

Purkiss said that audiences should have no trouble finding parallels in the present day. He noted the scorn with which illegal aliens from Mexico are sometimes held, yet observed that their labor is used for tasks that Americans decline to undertake. Like the Christians used the Jews in Europe, “we use the Mexicans for our own economic benefit,” he said.

A more moderate position was taken by John F. Andrews, the editor of the Guild Shakespeare and a scholar formerly associated with the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington.

“I never see two productions of ‘Merchant’ and come away with the same feeling,” he said. “You can either come away thinking it’s an anti-Semitic play, that it endorses the attitudes expressed by its characters, or you can take it another way and see it as a play about anti-Semitism, an almost anti-Christian play.”

Andrews noted that a 1988 production of “Merchant” at the Folger’s theater omitted some of the play’s offensive lines. “I think that’s a way of evading the issues,” he said. “It’s better to confront them head-on.”

The Grove production kept the controversial speeches, but Bradac did add a line to the final scene; the play’s fifth act, which occurs after a ruined Shylock has left the stage for good, is concerned with tying up the familiar Shakespearean comic subplots involving cross-dressing lovers and good-natured jests. After the merriment ends, Antonio, perhaps reflecting on Shylock’s downfall, repeats his first words in the play: “In sooth, I know not why I am so sad.”

The preview audience followed the play intently and gave due attention when Shylock, played by Alan Mandell, said his piece. But it was the comic moments of the play that generated the greatest reaction. Chuckles echoed through the trial scene, which in some productions is played very solemnly. Many in the audience laughed when Shylock, on the verge of claiming his pound of flesh, was undone as Portia, disguised as a male judge, twisted his words and instigated the ruling against him, to the glee of the Venetians.

The rabbis were not amused.

“I’m disappointed,” said Krause after the performance. “I didn’t see anything in this production that would make the Christian characters unsympathetic, as the director said they would be.

“I do believe that the text itself takes the Christians to task for the way they behave, but I don’t see that in this production.”

Rabbi Lawrence Goldmark, of La Mirada’s Temple Beth Ohr, thought the comedy overshadowed the tragic elements of the play. Commenting on the audience’s mirthful reaction throughout a work he considered dark and serious, Goldmark was moved to quote the Bard himself. “What fools these mortals be,” he said, in a line from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

Chelle Friedman, an officer of the Jewish Federation of Orange County, said that “Shylock came in less stereotyped than usual,” and she praised the theater company for “working hard to put the production in perspective.”

“The disappointment I feel, however, is that the audience didn’t seem to note that perspective.”

But many audience members said they enjoyed the mix of comedy and pathos, adding that they saw Shylock as a sympathetic character.

“I think of Shylock as more a hero than a villain,” said Clement Shoemaker, a pastor at St. Peter Lutheran Church in Santa Ana. “He seems to be a very honest, compassionate human being. In contrast, we see a depiction of Christians who are not living up to the standards of the faith. A play like this helps us to examine our values. I’m thrilled by it.”

Asked her interpretation of the play, Sonia Minassian, 16, who attended the performance with a group of Montebello high school students, said: “It shows how there’s prejudice against the Jews. Even if Shylock had bad intentions, he doesn’t deserve all that they do to him.”

Added Angelica Loera, 19, an East Los Angeles College student who came when a friend offered her a free ticket: “I don’t know much about Shakespeare, but I enjoyed the Jewish character.”

“The Merchant of Venice” continues through July 20 at the Garden Grove Shakespeare Festival in the festival amphitheater, 12852 Main St., Garden Grove. Show times are Thursday through Sunday at 8:30 p.m. Tickets: $16 to $23. Information: (714) 636-7213.