Shylock: The Stereotype Is Still a Problem : Stage: Two productions of Shakespeare’s ‘Merchant of Venice’ rekindle concerns from directors and community groups on how the bitter, miserly character is portrayed.

For many 14-year-olds, the doomed lovers Romeo and Juliet, and the uncertain prince Hamlet are the first Shakespearean characters to garner empathy.

This wasn’t 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,” said 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 production of “The Merchant of Venice” later this month, 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, only on the 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 against 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.

The play--written about 300 years after Jews had been expelled from England in 1290--has become so sensitive that the Grove Festival has invited members of the Jewish community to previews and to tell their concerns to Bradac and the company.

Indeed, at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, which opened a contemporary “Merchant” in February that continues through October, an uproar was raised by some Jews there who contended that the play validated contemporary anti-Semitism.

Director Libby Appel has 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.

Meanwhile, the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego is planning to produce a contemporary “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,” Hall said. “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.”

The Old Globe’s production, scheduled 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.

“Our sense was that we contemporize it so that we don’t shy away from the themes and their place in the modern world,” Hall said. “When you do Shakespeare in its own period, then the audience is left to dismiss it, if you will, or at least distance themselves from it. Leaving it in the 16th century lets all of us off the hook.”

Hall said the Old Globe is consulting with leaders in the Jewish community about the issues raised in the play. “One of the reasons we chose to do the production is because the issues of racism haven’t gone away. We haven’t solved the problems. We want to consult with the groups to develop a positive dialogue about how to promote those concerns.”

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. Shylock is given some of Shakespeare’s most memorable words when he justifies 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.”

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 said: “ ‘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, continues 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 said, ‘Go out and murder Jews.’ ”

“The problem,” said Chelle Friedman, a spokeswoman for the Jewish Federation of Orange County, “is if the play makes it seem that all Jews deserve to be treated the way Shylock is.”

Mindful of such concerns, the Grove invited Goldmark, Friedman and other representatives of the county’s Jewish community to a meeting with Bradac and his company as they prepared for their production, 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,” which features as Shylock the noted actor and director Alan Mandell, who is himself Jewish.

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.

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 that the Jewish community is taking,” she said.