Shylock on the Beach

By Richard Zoglin

"When I direct Shakespeare," theatrical innovator Peter Sellars once said, "the first thing I do is go to the text for cuts. I go through to find the passages that are real heavy, that really are not needed, places where the language has become obscure, the places where there is a bizarre detour." And then? "I take those moments, those elements, and I make them the centerpiece, the core of the production."

In the sober matter of staging Shakespeare, such audaciousness is hard to resist -- though a lot of Chicago theatergoers have been able to. Typically, a third of the people who show up at the Goodman Theatre to see Sellars' ingenious reworking of The Merchant of Venice walk out before the evening is over. It's no mystery why: the evening isn't over for nearly four hours (and this is one of Shakespeare's relatively short plays). Beyond that, the production pretty much upends everything the audience has come to expect from one of Shakespeare's most troubling but reliably entertaining comedies.

The play has been transplanted from the teeming, multicultural world of 15th century Venice, Italy, to the teeming, multicultural world of 1994 Venice Beach, California, where Sellars lives when he isn't setting Don Giovanni in Spanish Harlem, putting King Lear in a Lincoln Continental or deconstructing other classic plays and operas. Shylock, along with the play's other Jews, is black. Antonio, the merchant of the title, and his kinsmen are Latinos. Portia, the wealthy maiden being wooed by Antonio's friend Bassanio, is Asian. But the racial shuffling is just one of Sellars' liberties. The stage is furnished with little but office furniture, while video screens simulcast the actors in close-up during their monologues (and, in between, display seemingly unrelated Southern California scenes, from gardens and swimming pools to the L.A. riots). Cries of anguish come from the clowns, and the playfully romantic final scene, in which Portia teases Bassanio for giving away her ring to the lawyer she played in disguise, is reimagined as the darkest, most poisonously unsettling passage in the play.

Some of this seems to be sheer perversity, but the real shock of Sellars' production is how well it works both theatrically and thematically. The racial casting, for instance, is a brilliant way of defusing the play's anti-Semitism -- turning it into a metaphor for prejudice and materialism in all its forms. Paul Butler plays Shylock with basso-profundo self-assurance; he's a hardhearted ghetto businessman who, even when he is humiliated at the end, never loses his cool or stoops for pity.

Wrongheaded and tortuous as this Merchant sometimes is, the updating is witty and apt. The "news of the Rialto" becomes fodder for a pair of gossip reporters on a happy-talk TV newscast. Shylock's trial is presided over by a mumbling, superannuated judge who could have stepped right out of Court TV. With a few exceptions -- Elaine Tse's overwrought Portia, for instance -- the actors strike a nice balance between Shakespeare's poetry and Sellars' stunt driving. For the rest of us, it's a wild ride.