You may be a bit confused as you take your seat at Brooklyn’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center, as the second act of The Merchant of Venice is announced two or three times. Eventually our star enters the stage, peeved and flustered in Orthodox garb. The esteemed (or, at least, very, or somewhat, familiar) Canadian character actor, Saul Rubinek, is Playing Shylock…but he’s no longer playing The Merchant of Venice, which, due to a mixup involving an inept intern and a no longer embargoed press release, has been cancelled mid-performance, “concerns” about its ever-vexing 400-year-old content having surfaced. And Rubinek is about to raise hell about it.
I kid of course about our familiarity with Rubinek. Playing himself, more or less, he discusses a (meta) NPR appearance about Shylock, the 77-year-old’s dream role, with an interviewer who only wanted to talk about Frasier. (The chat did get around to the subject, only because one of his TV co-stars, Al Pacino, also played the part.) He’s a fixture, a welcome one, on TV shows also including Star Trek and an array of movies like Unforgiven and True Romance, here returning to the New York stage for the first time in decades. Mark Leiren-Young’s one-person play has been adapted for his biography, under the astute direction of Rubinek’s life-long friend and collaborator, Martin Kinch.
I’m a little leery of solo shows, fearing I’ll get called on to participate, fall asleep if I get bored, or laugh in the wrong places. Shylock and Shakespeare threatened something educational, an eat-your-vegetables lecture. But I figured, correctly, that Rubinek wouldn’t let me down. He’s a naturally funny performer, as much Falstaff as Shylock, and this is a frequently amusing show, which never gets sluggish over 100 or so minutes. You will learn things, but they go down easily, and you will also be moved.
The son of Holocaust survivors, Rubinek tells us he’s always been fascinated by Shylock, the problematic pound of flesh seeker. Yes, he’s a stereotype, and a problem for the Jews. But his half-dozen big moments highlight the play, Shakespeare’s blockbuster in his lifetime, written to capitalize on Christopher Marlowe’s more vile hit The Jew of Malta. (Or, rather, someone’s blockbuster, and Rubinek goes off on that too, making a case for famed arts patron Edward de Vere as the true author.) Shylock, Rubinek states, is “the first three-dimensional Jewish character in the history of English literature,” and worth saving in a time of rising antisemitism (“when has it not been rising?”), weak-kneed corporate sponsorship of the arts, and uninformed scolds who know the name of the character but nothing of the play. One thing he doesn’t get into, and it’s a bit of a hole in the presentation, is how “shylock” has come to be a slur, one that Trump the tough guy New Yorker still drops, as recently as July. Otherwise Rubinek shows him in his full, wretched, controversial humanity, performing the key scenes in English and Yiddish on Shawn Kerwin’s set, a Doge’s Palace with an overhanging wooden cross and “Jew” scrawled on the margins. It’s the role his actor father wanted to play, but didn’t, and he plays it in tribute to him and all the other Jews never cast in the show when someone dares do it, usually in carefully “conceptual” stagings, minus Jewish actors with tell-tale noses like his own.
Oh, and another thing–“all acting is appropriation,” so who cares if he was one of the few actual Jews cast in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel? And let’s talk about “cancellation” in general, beyond Shylock–and here I found myself silently disagreeing with Rubinek, if not entirely. (Some “appropriation” is bad, and “cancellation” is too easily mixed up with “accountability.”) But it’s his show, and it’s cleansing to hear all this hashed out loud. I left the theater refreshed…and wanting more. Maybe we’ll get it. Rubinek and his collaborators imagine a rewritten Merchant that more fully shows Shylock as a prosperous man endlessly frustrated by a social order that traps him in the ghetto, a victim as well as a victimizer. What we hear is promising. Let’s set it up properly and challenge the naysayers. Until then enjoy Playing Shylock, a brainy, dazzling, thought-provoking show.
Comments