O.C. THEATER : A Venetian Bind : Grove Festival Seeks to Be Sensitive in Staging ‘Merchant’

For many 14-year-olds, the doomed lovers Romeo and Juliet, or the uncertain prince Hamlet, are the first Shakespearean characters to garner empathy. Not so for Tom Bradac; as an eighth-grader at the all-boys Our Lady Queen of Angels School in the San Fernando Valley, it was Shylock the Jew, mocked, hated and cursed by his fellow Venetians as “the very devil incarnal,” who brought the 400-year-old folios alive.

“ ‘The Merchant of Venice’ was the play that turned me on to Shakespeare,” recalls Bradac, who today is the producing artistic director of the Grove Shakespeare Festival. “I identified very strongly with the character because of the great suffering the man endured. Shylock isn’t a hero, but he is a human being.”

However, as the Garden Grove-based festival prepares to mount its first-ever production of “The Merchant of Venice,” Bradac, who will direct it, has come upon the issue that has haunted the play since the Enlightenment: Shylock the moneylender, whatever justifications he employs in demanding his pound of flesh, symbolizes some of the most notorious Christian stereotypes of Jews.

Depicted as a venal, embittered miser, Shylock repeatedly vents his hatred of Christians and lends money to Antonio, the merchant of the play’s title, on condition that he be paid a “pound of flesh” should Antonio default.

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 denied his flesh, forced to forfeit all his possessions and made to convert to Christianity.

Throughout the play--written some 300 years after Jews had been expelled from England in 1290--Shakespeare contrasts what he considers the Jewish obsession with justice (Shylock’s insistence that however cruel, the law uphold his agreement with Antonio) with Christian mercy, which the Bard depicts as the Venetians’ decision to spare Shylock’s life and to force him to convert, thereby gaining him salvation.

Yet Shylock is given some of Shakespeare’s most memorable words, justifying his severe position to the Christians who long have spit upon him. “Thou call’dst me dog before thou hadst a cause,” he tells Antonio. “But, since I am a dog, beware my fangs.”

The role has appealed to actors for centuries, from Richard Burbage in Shakespeare’s day to Dustin Hoffman, who appeared in a well-received 1989 production in London and New York. Largely Christian audiences have loved the play, making it, by one reckoning, the most performed of Shakespeare’s works after “Hamlet.” The Grove’s managing director, Barbara Hammerman, reports that “Merchant” is the play most requested by the company’s subscribers.

Still, Rabbi Lawrence Goldmark says “ ‘The Merchant of Venice’ continues to be a very, very difficult play for a Jewish person to sit through. Shylock is a negative term. When a person is called a Shylock, we know what that means, just as we know what it means to call somebody a Judas.

“The Christian characters don’t come out of this play looking too good either, but the Jew comes out as the worst of the worst.”

Given that the play’s text treats Jews as inherently villainous, an insensitive production can fuel anti-Semitism, continued Goldmark, a past president of the Orange County Board of Rabbis.

“I don’t think there’s a danger that people will watch this play and then go out and burn synagogues,” he said. “It’s more a question of painting Jews with a transcendent stereotype. Because it’s so well-written, ‘The Merchant of Venice’ is much more insidious than a play that just says, ‘Go out and murder Jews.’ ”

Mindful of such concerns, the Grove invited Goldmark, Chelle Friedman of the Jewish Federation of Orange County, and other representatives of the county’s Jewish community to a meeting with Bradac and his company two weeks ago as they prepared for their production, which is scheduled to open June 20.

The aim of the meeting, Hammerman said, was to “share with them our concept of the play: Why do it? What does it have to say to a modern audience? What is the director’s vision of the treatment?” Equally important, she said, was the company’s desire to hear the concerns of Jewish leaders. “It was illuminating for us in a number of ways,” Hammerman said.

The Grove will continue to consult with Jewish leaders and educators during the rehearsal period, and has invited all 15 members of the Orange County Board of Rabbis to attend preview performances of “Merchant” next month.

Hammerman said that while the Jewish leaders welcomed the chance to discuss their concerns about “Merchant,” none of them objected to the Grove’s decision to stage the play. “It’s a very responsible position,” she said, “that the Jewish community is taking.”

While not proposing any changes in “Merchant’s” text, Jewish leaders have asked that the theater program explain the social context of the play’s hostility toward Jews. For example, Friedman said, the Grove’s educational materials could note that Jews became moneylenders because they were barred from most other occupations. Goldmark suggested that the program could observe that centuries of the kind of anti-Semitism exemplified in “The Merchant of Venice” led, ultimately, to the holocaust.

Although Hammerman said the company planned its outreach effort last year, when it decided to stage the play, the Grove’s actions come on the heels of a controversial “Merchant of Venice” production at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland.

In that production, which opened in February and continues through October, director Libby Appel placed the action in modern Venice, garbing its Christian characters in stylish Armani suits, depicting a stoop-shouldered Shylock as a New York-accented, yarmulke-wearing Orthodox Jew.

Appel, who is herself Jewish, said she aimed to demonstrate the continuing relevance of the play’s themes of intolerance and greed. But the production nonetheless led to an uproar among some Oregon Jews, who contended that it served to validate contemporary anti-Semitism.

The controversy surprised Jerry Turner, the Oregon festival’s artistic director. “I do not understand why Shylock should be regarded as a prototype Jew,” he said. “ ‘The Miser’ of Moliere’ “--in which the title character Harpagon ruins the lives of all around him--”is never regarded as an example of all that is French.”

Turner said he knew that the Shylock character had, historically, given Christian audiences a demeaning portrayal of Jews and Judaism. “God knows, I don’t have any desire to continue a negative tradition here,” he said. But, he added, “I think the fear of that is overdone.” He asserted that the prominence of Jewish entertainers nationwide makes it unlikely that Christian audiences would found their opinions of Jews solely on Shylock. “After all, we see Jewish comedians and actors all the time. Even if you don’t have Jews in your neighborhood, you can’t escape the kind of culture there is on TV.”

Besides, he said, “to try to find the values of the play and still not offend anybody seems to be an almost impossible task.”

The Old Globe Theatre in San Diego is planning to produce “The Merchant of Venice” this year, and managing director Thomas Hall said the company long has been grappling with the problems posed by the piece.

“You’re dealing with a play written during a period of time when anti-Semitism was the accepted point of view in England,” said Hall. “Consequently, you have to consider that, along with the fact that the experiences we’ve had as a modern civilization, particularly the Second World War, make this more of a sensitive issue.

“One does not blithely produce ‘The Merchant of Venice’ and ignore those issues,” said Hall.

The Old Globe’s production, slated to run from June 28 to Aug. 11, will star Hal Holbrook as Shylock and, like the Oregon show, will be staged in modern dress.

Hall said the Old Globe had not yet consulted with members of San Diego’s Jewish community but may do so as the production advances. “I don’t think you can be too sensitive,” he said. “But ultimately, the production we put on the stage will be a product that we put on.”

In Garden Grove, Bradac says, “we’re approaching the play from the text, as opposed to troweling any huge interpretation on top of it. The play is very complex; there are elements of anti-Semitism there, but that’s not what the play is about.

“What it is about is the search for the nature of the individual, the self.”

Like others involved in “Merchant” productions, Bradac noted, the play was originally considered a comedy, with its convoluted subplots involving Portia and her suitors, as well as Shylock’s clownish servant, Lancelot Gobbo.

In more recent years, Bradac said, subtexts that Shakespeare, “genius that he was,” may not have intended, have come to dominate interpretations of the play. In addition to its depiction of anti-Semitism, the text includes derogatory references to a Moorish character and in general paints a portrait of a hypocritical society dominated by the love of money.

Bradac said the Grove production will be enriched by the presence of the noted actor and director Alan Mandell as Shylock. Mandell, Bradac said, “is an actor who happens to be Jewish, and so he brings a certain passion and sensitivity to the character.”

Mandell, for his part, said his ethnicity had little do to with his interest in the role.

“I’m not going to do Shylock in order to mount a crusade,” he said. “It’s a challenging role for an actor, and at my age”--Mandell is 63--there are only a few of those left.”

* The Grove Shakespeare Festival’s “The Merchant of Venice” opens June 20 at the Festival Amphitheatre, 12852 Main St., Garden Grove. Information: (714) 636-7213.