Spite!

Merchant of Venice (Annotated) and Scintilla
By Steven Leigh Morris

Joe Jordan, Julie A. Lockhart, and Diana Tanaka (Photo by Taso Papadakis)

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Shakespeare probably never met a Jewish person because Jews had been evicted from England for 300 years when he wrote The Merchant of Venice.

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A theater performance in a church. Alright, that alone has got my attention. As it would anybody who connects the art of theater to its theological origins. I’m referring to writer-director Aaron Henne’s The Merchant of Venice (Annotated,) presented by Theatre Dybbuk (the company that Henne leads) in partnership with the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles, where it’s being performed.

The performance was developed with the ensemble (Joe Jordan, Adam Lebowitz-Lockard, Julie A. Lockhart, Diana Tanaka and Inger Tudor) among others, including consulting scholars such as Jennifer Wells, Erith Jaffe-Berg, and Daniel Pollack-Pelzner.

Let’s start with what it’s not: Merchant of Venice (Annotated) is not a living room drama.

Nor is it Shakespeare’s play referenced in the title. It includes swaths of the play, and it traverses the play scene by scene. But while doing so, it analyzes the play; it peppers recitations from the play with historical Elizabethan, pre-Elizabethan, Jacobean, Biblical and contemporary anecdotes that have some bearing on the play’s themes or provide some illuminating context to a scene.

Some of its references date as recently as March, 2023. Ron DeSantis and the most prior U.S. president put in appearances, for example. In one striking irony, I saw the performance on May 15 — the one-year anniversary of the mass shooting in Buffalo, New York. Driving to the theater, I heard on the radio a ceremony in Buffalo that included church bells and the reading out of the names of the victims of that shooting — all Black. And then, in the performance, there was almost the same scene, a ceremonial reading out of the names of those victims, not in honor of the anniversary, but because it was part of the play. Like The Merchant of Venice itself, this is a performance about bigotry — the kind of bigotry that burns eternal, in a circle of hell, traversing continents and epochs.

For the record, there’s a subtitle and/or alternate title, In Sooth, I know Not Why I am So Sad. That mystery of why one might feel so sad is resolved well before the conclusion of this theater piece that examines centuries of spite, leading to pointless cruelty that’s occasionally tempered by gestures of mercy. By play’s end, one doesn’t exactly feel cheered, but this prodigiously researched history lesson provides a strong and sage rationale for feeling “so sad.”

This is not a style of performance one generally finds on LA’s stages, nor on America’s stages for that matter. But if you see theater in or from Poland, or the Balkans, or is certain quarters of Western Europe, or Central and South America, this will look familiar.

Local exceptions, i.e. other companies employing Theatre Dybbuk’s presentational, conceptual theater-of-ideas aesthetic: Nancy Keystone’s Critical Mass Performance Group, Ghost Road Theatre Company, sometimes City Garage Theatre and always whatever shows up at REDCAT.

But let’s get back to church — the intimate Shatto Chapel to be precise, where the event unfolds. The audience is seated on risers aligned with a stained glass window, portraits of saints, the seating bank faces a platform stage with the visual backdrop of organ pipes that are built into the facility. In fact, much if not most of Daniel Tator’s sound design employs that organ — from tones whimsical to melodramatic. Fahad Siadat is the composer and music director, Andrew Anderson is the keyboardist.

It’s tough in a cavernous chapel (yes, the space is intimate, but the vaulted ceiling goes up and up) to sculpt lighting effects with precision; lighting designer Brandon Baruch meets that challenge, combining a general wash of light that bathes the stage (occasionally taking on a red hue for dramatic effect) with strip-ring lights around the stage’s perimeter, supplemented by actors wielding pen lights. A microphone is clipped to each actor to help redress acoustical challenges, though in some of the ensemble chorales, it’s a wash nonetheless.

Kathryn Poppen’s costumes range from gray overalls to white pantaloons containing snippets of text, to plastic garbage bags fashioned into black cloaks. The consistent costume piece worn by all five actors throughout is an Elizabethan collar.

On the stage are five music stands and six steel trash bins. Cash notes saturate the stage. Much of the stage activity consists of the actors using brooms to sweep up the cash, like dust, placing it in trash bins or garbage cans. Among the repeated devices, before commencing a speech, an actor will hold a trash bin over their head, turn it upside down and wait for the cascade of “value” to saturate them, before speaking.

The Merchant of Venice derives its plot from money, and the loaning of it — with interest. “Neither a borrower nor a lender be,” is not in this performance, though in the logic of a dream, Hamlet’s (and Shakespeare’s) mockery of the “foolish, prating knave” (Polonius) who speaks that line, percolates into this production nonetheless. Where would the international banking system be, not to mention home ownership, car ownership, small business ownership, were Polonius’s parting counsel to his son actually practiced?

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The beauty of Henne’s play and his production is that it’s not really a play, it’s an oratorio, spoken (and sung) in a church, and gorgeously rendered by the ensemble and the design team.

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Shakespeare’s play turns on capricious applications of law, on mutual condescension and its attendant grievances between Christians and Jews, and on sundry qualities of spite and mercy — all stemming from the issuance of a loan, made by a Jew, Shylock, to a Christian (Antonio) with the bond of “a pound of flesh” to be taken from the borrower’s heart should he not repay the loan within three months. The 21^st century American question of whether predatory loans to pay for a university education should be “forgiven” (mercy) are not so far removed from The Merchant of Venice, despite the distance of some 500 years, though the Biden policy is one of the few contemporary references not included in this production.

This is probably because author-director Henne’s (and company) production is so focused on bigotry in general and racism is particular.

Sort of.

We certainly get an earful on the Christian Right banning books with its battle cry of “woke indoctrination,” and the grating hypocrisy that accompanies such charges. Yet how exactly is book-banning tied to racism or bigotry? Well, when the books being banned — and teachers and librarians promoting such books find themselves targets of government investigation — are accepting of gays and of trans people, or when (even worse!) books are candid about the now, evidently in Florida, unmentionable practice of slavery in the United States, one can feel the racism bubbling up. This is a battle over creation myths – theological and xenophobic.  

Henne’s primary concern (because it’s repeated in his production) is how, through history, things get really scary when the state becomes the enforcer of Church doctrine, particularly when Church doctrine, as it existed under England’s King Henry VIII and his daughter, Shakespeare’s patron Queen Elizabeth I, comes grounded in bigotry. (Shakespeare probably never met a Jewish person because Jews had been evicted from England for 300 years when he wrote The Merchant of Venice.)

There’s also a reference to Queen Elizabeth’s “Anti Buggery Law of 1593,” a 530-year-echo of the 240 anti-LGBTQ laws proposed in the U.S. in 2022, the latest in a rising wave of intolerance.

The beauty of Henne’s play and his production is that it’s not really a play, it’s an oratorio, spoken (and sung) in a church, and gorgeously rendered by the ensemble and the design team. It takes factoids from the contemporary culture wars and filters them through fastidiously researched history, dating back to the Crucifixion, all seen through the lens of one fascinating play by William Shakespeare.

That’s pretty good, in my view.

This doesn’t make one less sad that we continue to grapple with the same shit deposited eons earlier, though we’re swatting different flies that now buzz around it; however, it does provide some solace that our generations did not invent the kinds of miseries that our culture seems so doggedly determined to perpetuate.

The drawback of the entire endeavor is that sprinkling contemporary anecdotes, in the attempt to provide relevance to ancient patterns of behavior, runs the risk of conflation. Victor Orban, the autocratic, Putin-friendly president of Hungary referenced in this production, is quite different from Ron DeSantis —  both are worlds apart from King Henry VIII, yet this production aims to paint them with the same brush, or roller. The parallels are not untrue, they’re just imprecise.

I imagine this a consequence of Henne trying to carry the entire world, dating back to the Crucifixion, on the back of his play. The ambition is admirable, even if the weight causes the knees to buckle. The play is also too long, but that’s a quibble.

I’ll take such ambition any day of the week.

Burning Down the House

Carlos Lacámara, Taylor Gilbert, Kris Frost and Krishna Smitha (Photo by Peggy McCartha)

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How do we cope with the end of the world? How do we live with ourselves, when the essences of who we are, our memories, are slipping away?

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Over at North Hollywood’s Road Theatre, Alessandro Camon’s Scintilla is burning down the house. Literally. Almost.

It’s the wine country in Northern California, and we meet Michael (Kris Frost) and his girlfriend, Nora (Krishna Smitha) driving to his mom’s house. And what a house! Holy crap. Stephen Gifford’s set gives us what looks like a mahogany frame to a gorgeous, expansive living room and dining room framed by looming windows that look out onto a verdant forest.

There’s a fire on the other side of the river and the highway, and Michael wants to swoop his mom Marianne (Taylor Gilbert), who owns the house, to safety. Michael can’t stand his mom, but that’s a different story. No, seriously, it’s a different story.

The actual story is the fire. It’s the story and it’s the symbol of what we’ve done and what we continue to do to ourselves. It’s the outward-facing existential crisis that makes this play matter. But there’s also an inward-facing existential crisis. Marianne has early onset Alzheimer’s, and is fully cognizant that a lifetime of memories are all going to vanish.

It’s the juxtaposition of these two end-of-the-world scenarios, one so public and one so private, that gives this play its poetry. There are poetical passages, but that’s not what I mean. It’s the juxtaposition of a unstoppable fire and the erosion of memory. How do we cope with the end of the world? How do we live with ourselves, when the essences of who we are, our memories, are slipping away?

Defying her son, Marianne doesn’t wish to go with him, or with anybody. This may sound crazy, but it’s not. She has her reasons for being so stubborn, and they’re plausible.

Nora is vegan-ish and aches to be close to nature; however, boyfriend Michael works algorithms for a tech company in San Francisco. You know when you buy a T-shirt online, and for the next six months, your phone is bombarded with ads for online T-shirts: That’s his job. Which kind of makes you want to slap him. But even without that job, he’s smug, being the first to snap, “Don’t patronize me,” when all he’s been doing is patronizing everybody in the room. He and Nora are living what she describes as a hamster-wheel existence. She’s looking for balance, he’s looking for success.

Marianne has a Vietnam vet neighbor/ex-lover named Stanley (David Gianopoulos), a rugged old-school survivalist. He’s even built a bunker, should the fire get too close, to sweep Marianne to safety. This pisses off Michael. Stanley has a great story, well told by Gianopoulos, of how, as a child, he learned to cope with an inferno. And then there was the war.

As the fire gets closer, add to the mix a houseless neighbor Roberto (Carlos Lacámara), beaten up and seeking refuge, because some thugs decided that he (or his type) set the fire. Roberto didn’t set the fire. The violence against him is just bigotry. And there’s the connective tissue linking Scintilla to Merchant of Venice (Annotated)

Scintilla — referring to a tiny spark that, in the current environment, can trigger the seventh circle of hell — couldn’t be more different in style from Merchant. With Gifford’s set, it’s the embodiment of the style of cinematic plays that dominate LA’s intimate theater landscape, and much of American theater. It’s all a bit antiquated, emulating the style of drawing room plays from the 1930s, but it’s what we do in a TV/movie town, sometimes quite well.

With its vaulted, oratorical scale, Merchant has no interest in family squabbles and recriminations and reconciliations. But inside the living room of Scintilla, we’re going to learn why Michael so resents his mother, and, by God, they’re going to fix it. Family secrets will be exposed. As the old proverb goes, “The house is on fire, and they’re trying to fix a leak under the sink.” Within a frame as profound as the blending of an inferno and the loss of memory, the family drama feels both contrived and trite. Multiple villages are now on fire —they barely have time to grab their documents, but they have time to fix mommy issues?

There’s also a scene where Stanley has a health crisis. Well, there’s the kitchen sink.

So, no, it’s not a perfect play, but it has profundity in its grasp; director Ann Hearn Tobolowky has tempered the melodrama by eliciting a quintet of tender, often moving performances in a staging that’s both smart and credible. 

THE MERCHANT OF VENICE (ANNOTATED), or IN SOOTH I KNOW NOT WHY I AM SO SAD | Written and directed by Aaron Henne | Theatre Dybbuk at the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles, Shatto Chapel; 540 S. Commonweatlh Ave., LA; Fri.-Sat., 8 pm; Sun., 7 pm; through May 21. https://merchant-annotated.eventbrite.com     Two hours and 45 minutes, with one 15 minute intermission.

 SCINTILLA | by Allesandro Camon | Road Theatre Company, 10747 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood; Fri.-Sat., 8 pm; Sun., 2 pm; through June 4. https://roadtheatre.org. 80 minutes, no intermission