Shakespeare's notoriously difficult The Merchant of Venice is its own evil twin. On the one hand, there's a thorny and complex story about racial division and the price of revenge. On the other hand, that story is worked into the gaps of an aggressively typical (for Shakespeare) romantic comedy. It's this dichotomy that makes the play work -- when it does work -- but a lopsided production makes trouble for itself.
Such a lopsided production is playing at the Duke. Merchant's complex story is favored over its simple one, and the dramatic weight falls completely on the strong shoulders of F. Murray Abraham, whose vicious, eloquent Shylock earns not only our pity but our full sympathy. Ironically, the aggressive victimizing of Shylock makes the play less complicated, not more. We understand his fury at Antonio (Tom Nelis, another excellent casting choice) perhaps too well; in the hands of director Darko Tresnjak, Abraham has the fury of a Hamlet or Macbeth. Shakespeare's best trick in this play is that Shylock isn't Hamlet or Macbeth; he's a victim whom persecution has made into a terror. By the time he has his knife at Antonio's chest in Tresnjak's production, however, we want him to go through with it and get away scot-free.
These choices demonstrate a lack of faith in Shakespeare more than anything else (although the straitjacketed Wall Street-style resetting has problems of its own). At the end of the play, Shylock is sentenced to convert to Christianity, and Abraham wrenchingly plays the scene as both pricked and bleeding. Do we then need his abandoned yarmulke on the stage, front and center, until the lights go down?
The buttoned-down, modern, urban concept makes for a few good jokes -- pictures and messages are delivered on cell phones, for instance, and Balthazar (Arnie Burton) wrings some levity from a faulty headset -- but Linda Cho's costumes constrict the comic actors so much that they're fighting for every chuckle. Sometimes the constriction is literal: Kate Forbes is bright enough as Portia, but she can't move a foot in those three-inch heels and thus can't physically compete with her male co-stars except by looking sexy.
Still, there's Abraham, whose textual mastery brings welcome energy to all his scenes, and there's Nelis, whose character expresses unreasoning hatred for Shylock in one moment and deep affection for Bassanio (Saxon Palmer) in the next.
The same cast fares better in Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, a slighter play but a more enjoyable one to watch for the first hour. If in Merchant the actors seem too hemmed in, here director David Herskovits lets them run riot. Much of the humor is deliberately designed to offend Christian and Jew alike (more the former than the latter, honestly), and it plays as crude, silly, and basically harmless until after intermission, at which point the production starts taking liberties with the script and becomes The Jew of South Park (unless my chronology is off and Marlowe coined the term "beeyotch"). The formerly soft-spoken Palmer trashes up the already filthy character of Pilia-Borza, and Forbes joins him in the gutter as Bellamira, his favorite hooker. Apparently ham isn't as taboo as we were led to believe.
Once the play descends to this level, it never quite recovers, and it's just a matter of waiting until it finishes. If Abraham was Hamlet in The Merchant of Venice, as The Jew of Malta's Barabas, he's Richard III. That's fine by me -- he's easy to root for even as the sociopathic bad guy.
The two plays are worth seeing for the performances, particularly Abraham's, even though each director undercuts his show: Merchant is too much enthralled by the rethinking of the setting and the character of Shylock; Malta disappears into its lack of discipline. Still, in each case, the ensemble brings an occasional fluidity to the stage that creates something vital, if only for moments at a time.
Presented by Theatre for a New Audience
at the Duke on 42nd Street, 229 W. 42nd St., NYC.
Feb. 4-March 11. Schedule varies.
(212) 239-6200 or (800) 432-7250 or www.telecharge.com.
Casting by Deborah Brown.