He likes a bit of a laugh, this Shylock. Played with cool authority by John Douglas Thompson in a suit that blends with the grey concrete of Riccardo Hernandez’s brutalist set, he is even-tempered and jovial. Whether he is a “villain with a smiling cheek”, as Antonio characterises him, is a moot point. His darker side lies just below the genial surface, not so much a character flaw as the product of an oppressive culture.
Take Antonio. Played by Alfredo Narciso, he comes across as sensitive, generous, maybe even soulful; the kind of good guy who would stump up 3,000 ducats for a friend even when his wealth is all at sea. His look – suit and T-shirt, white sneakers, no socks – has the air of tech-bro affluence.
Like so many of the men in this lucid production by Arin Arbus for New York’s Theatre for a New Audience, he is charming when things are going his way. Should anything challenge the status quo, however, the complacency cracks. Haynes Thigpen’s boorish Gratiano is the only one you can imagine in a Maga cap, but these are men accustomed to things going their way. When they do not, their antisemitic outbursts are poisonous.
In this context, Isabel Arraiza’s sporty Portia is, like Shylock, playing an overbearing system to her own advantage. Fortune favours her above Shylock, but she is similarly marginalised. In the middle of boxing training, she grasps what little agency she has by punching out the names of her suitors. Going undercover with her servant Nerissa (Shirine Babb), she knocks sense into the male establishment, undermining them as she goes.
What comes across is a play about value, the relative worth of a ship and a friendship, an inheritance and a marriage, a Jew and a Christian, a ring and an oath. The cost of investing in the material, the production seems to say, is the humanity that binds us together.
Lest we suppose a play about antisemitism is itself antisemitic, Arbus leaves us with an image of a defeated and deflated Shylock incanting Hebrew with daughter Jessica (Danaya Esperanza), exiled from a society that is tolerant until it is not.
