Tuesday,
February 06, 2007
"Merchant of
The
ANNOTICO Report
Leslie Camhi is getting her knickers in a twist
because she finds that two long time classics written by one of the greatest
playwrights of all time, and the other a highly regarded playwright, are being
played on Broadway, and she feels they are less than complimentary
toward Jews.
I
wonder what Leslie has said in the past about the printed word denigrating
other Ethnics. I would be particularly interested in hearing what Leslie had to
say about the "Sopranos".
Was
it Freedom of Speech, Not Stifling Creativity, Not having to be PC, Not
being so Sensitive, After all some of it is True, etc, etc, etc,
It's
called Hypocrisy, or merely being Self Centered????!!!!!!
The (Elizabethan) Jewish Conspiracy
Talking to Theater for a New
Audience about restaging anti-Semitic classics
The Village Voice
by Leslie Camhi
February 5th, 2007
New York Jews, wringing their hands about the rise of anti-Semitism abroad, need look no further than Broadway, where a couple of money-grubbing, blood-lusting members of the tribe are currently hogging the spotlights. At the Duke Theater, Academy Award-winning actor F. Murray Abraham, in collaboration with Theater for a New Audience, is starring as Shylock, the immortal usurer of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice; and on alternate nights, as Barabas, the outrageously villainous lead in Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta.
Both plays trade in stereotypes with a long history of murderous consequences. Consider one recent example. Last year, Ilan Halimi, a French Jew, was kidnapped and tortured to death in a Parisian suburb; his abductors, members of a multi-ethnic immigrant gang, said they assumed his family would pay a handsome ransom, because "all Jews have money." As Marlowe's play opens, with the merchant Barabas "discovered in his counting house, with heaps of gold before him," it's clear we are entering an imaginary territory fraught with violent and conflicting emotions.
Theater for a New Audience's artistic director, Jeffrey Horowitz, started planning this season of works exploring images of Jews as outsiders two years ago. (The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a 19th-century forgery "documenting" a worldwide Jewish conspiracy, had already appeared as a soap opera on Egyptian television, but Iran's president had not yet publicly denied the Holocaust or called for Israel's destruction.) Later this month, the company will perform readings of four 20th-century dramas, chosen by its literary adviser, Village Voice theater critic Michael Feingold. And in April, it will perform British director Neil Bartlett's stage adaptation of Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens, whose Fagin was based upon a notorious 19th-century Jewish criminal.
"I didn't set out to make my version of Rachel
Corrie," Horowitz told me recently,
referring to the one-woman show about the American activist killed by an
Israeli army bulldozer in
It's unlikely that Shakespeare or Marlowe had
ever met a Jew. The majority of medieval British Jews, some 2,000 souls, had
been expelled from
The notoriously shady Marlowe, whom historians suspect of both spying upon and fomenting Catholic dissidence, was drawn to the Jew as a figure of shifting allegiances and sheer defiance. At first, his Barabas merely glories in his wealth. Yet when the Catholic Knights of Malta unjustly seize his goods to pay a debt owed to the Ottoman Turks, he vows revenge; bodies (fruit of his machinations) begin piling up, and soon a convent full of nuns lies dead.
F. Murray Abraham (son of a Syrian Christian and an Italian Catholic) has acted plenty of Jewish roles before, though this may be the first time he's entered a scene bowing and scraping with a Yiddish accent. His Barabas repeatedly "plays the Jew," feigning submission to further his aims.
"The play is funny, offensive, horrible,
shocking in parts, and then funny again," says its director, David Herskovitz, whose manic
So too, The Merchant of Venice ranks among Shakespeare's comedies, but in this dark and disturbing play, characters speak of Christian mercy while a man is stripped of his family, possessions, religion, and dignity. When Shylock, a figure much spit upon in Venetian society, extends a loan to his enemy, the wealthy (if temporarily strapped) Christian merchant Antonio, he demands as guarantee just this: a pound of the merchant's flesh. Surprise: Antonio defaults, and suddenly Shylock wants what is owed him.
"What they do to this Jew, and what he threatens to do in return, are both horrifying acts," says James Shapiro, author of Shakespeare and the Jews. "Productions that don't work tend to downplay one or the other."
In fact, Shakespeare's own father had been tried for usury, and his portrayal of Shylock is profoundly ambivalent: a cruel stereotype infused with a deep humanity. The Nazis staged The Merchant of Venice some 50 times but had to make substantial cuts, leaving out both Shylock's daughter's elopement with a Christian (which ran contrary to Nuremberg laws against intermarriage), and her father's desperate grief at this turn of events, which elicits our sympathy. Still, it's hard to imagine it as effective propaganda.
Glimpsed in previews, director Darko Tresnjak's emotionally
precise production sets the play sometime in the near future, in an unnamed
financial capital. But its truths are timeless. "It's not a play that
celebrates diversity," the director said over coffee in
And for Herskovitz,
Marlowe's
http://www.villagevoice.com/theater/0706,camhi,75717,11.html
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