Sunday, July 06, 2008
A+E, Theater, Reviews

On second thought ...

Elegant ‘Merchant’ has our critic eating his words

By Bert Osborne
 
Am I losing it? First, I had to sing a different tune about Onstage Atlanta’s “Urinetown the Musical” a couple of weeks ago (rather hated the original, really liked the revival). Last week, I was crying “Gimme a break!” from so many Shakespearean productions. But now director Sabin Epstein and company have me eating those words with a sleek, masterful Georgia Shakespeare staging of “The Merchant of Venice.”
 
It’s one of the Bard’s more problematic plays—by uneasy turns a calculated, anti-Semitic courtroom drama and a routine, anticlimactic romantic comedy. After the culmination of the legal proceedings between the Jewish moneylender Shylock and the indebted Antonio (a thought-provoking debate about the qualities of mercy and justice), the lovestruck travails of Portia and Bassanio (mistaken identities, misplaced jewelry) seem obligatory and trivial in contrast.
 
In an honorably understated performance, Chris Kayser strikes a brilliant balance as Shylock, who’s neither wholly a devilish villain nor a sympathetic victim—and yet subtle shades of both. For whatever reason, he’s also the only member of the cast to affect a European accent, a nice touch in emphasizing his social distinction from everyone else; nevertheless, it may have felt more purposeful had Epstein urged Susannah Millonzi (as Shylock’s wayward daughter and the play’s other major Jewish character) to follow suit.
 
Thankfully, in light of her uninspired work in the troupe’s concurrent “As You Like It,” Park Krausen is back in fine and graceful form, playing Portia with a cunning wink and a knowing nod. (Moreover, her drag scene here as an enterprising lawyer is drawn with all the delicious skill her drag scenes in the other show lack.) Elsewhere in the ensemble, Hudson Adams scores in comic relief as one of her doting suitors, and Tess Malis Kincaid delivers a wondrous musical interlude (composed by Laura Karpman) as her lady-in-waiting.
 
Krausen, Kincaid and Millonzi look absolutely fabulous in costume designer Christine Turbitt’s sumptuous gowns (with many of the men in dashing whites). Indeed, Epstein’s version is altogether elegantly rendered and performed—lovely to behold, emotionally accessible, intellectually potent, and unfolding at a constant pace that rarely lags. Were all Shakespearean shows this thoroughly well done, I wouldn’t have been so hasty last week to suggest we could ever get enough of them.
 
Much of the ongoing controversy about the play stems, if not from the depiction of Shylock himself, then from the reactions he generates in other characters, who consider him an “inexorable dog” worthy of spitting on (quite literally). They should meet the offensive stereotypes on parade in “Jewtopia,” a moronic comedy (by Bryan Fogel and Sam Wolfson) that might turn anyone anti-Semitic. Where “Merchant of Venice” has me eating my words, “Jewtopia” just makes me want to throw them up.
 
Under the first-time direction (!) of artistic director Blake Hall, the play marks an inauspicious debut for the new Center Theatre, a reconfiguration of the recently dissolved Jewish Theatre of the South. Tony Larkin and Eric Mendenhall portray obnoxious bachelors who go to shameless and painfully unfunny lengths to find—dupe? ensnare?—their ideal women, from Internet dating to elective circumcision. Ladies (and gents, for that matter), run for your lives. SP