Summary 
Under-acted and overproduced modernization to contemporary Venice Beach, California, with racial casting of the Belmontese, Venetians, and Jews underscoring social tragedy and miscarriage of justice. Set within a television studio and featuring extensive use of video imagery, the uncut text is amplified by microphone, with torturous and slow atonal enunciation by the actors. Provocative concepts but funereal pacing and at nearly four hours, a woeful lack of tragedy or drama.
Design
Directed by Peter Sellars. Lights by James Ingalls. Costumes by Dunya Ramocova. Sound by Bruce Odland.
Cast
Geno Silva (Antonio), Joe Quintero (Salerio), Richard Coca (Solanio), John Ortiz (Bassanio), Rene Rivera (Lorenzo), Carlos Sanz (Gratiano), Elaine Tse (Portia), Lori Tan Chinn (Nerissa), Midori Nakamura (Balthasar), Paul Butler (Shylock), Tyrone Beasley (Morocco), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Launcelot Gobbo), Del Close (Old Gobbo/Duke of Venice), David Anzuelo (Leonardo), Portia Johnson (Jessica), Anjul Nigam (Arragon), Ernest Perry, Jr. (Tubal).
Analysis
Controversial director Peter Sellars helms a modernized Merchant of Venice for the Goodman Theatre. Sellars, a Harvard graduate with extensive experience directing opera despite being only in his mid-thirties, chose not to omit any of Shakespeare's original text, and he was cited in a pre-opening newspaper article as being "delighted" the show was only running seven-and-a-half hours in its second week of rehearsal. Sellars' final uncut version runs just under four hours, including an intermission, and features Sellars' defining approach of exploring and enhancing obscure passages. Not very well received by a sophisticated yet traditionally-oriented Goodman audience base - between one-third and two-thirds of the audience appears to reject the lengthy, heavily-stylized show, not returning after intermission - but Sellars is already slated to showcase the production on a European tour of London, Paris, and Hamburg.
Under Sellars' iconoclastic microscope, The Merchant of Venice is no longer a difficult "problem comedy" with romance interwoven within a tale of money-lending and vindictiveness, but a social tragedy that condemns contemporary racial injustice. Sellars twists, downplays or outright denies romantic and humorous elements - for example, Portia's romance with Bassanio is complicated by Bassanio's apparently bisexual relationship with Antonio; the usually clownish Launcelot Gobbo is played by Philip Seymour Hoffman as an embittered yuppie; and the potentially light suitor scenes are played as a life-and-death choice between metal coffins - focusing instead on what Goodman press materials call "the economic roots of racism." Shakespeare's play, pointedly set at the 17th-century dawn of modern capitalism, is cleverly relocated and modernized by Sellars to 1990s Venice Beach, California, a multi-ethnic beach community awash with elitist and prodigious wealth as well as mired in gangs and poverty. Sellars' most insightful flourish is his racial casting: the Venetians within the story are street punk hip-hop Hispanics; the wealthy Belmontese are played by Asian-Americans; and the Jewish characters are portrayed by African-Americans, with strong parallels apparent between Blacks and Jews as outsiders dispossessed from their homeland and victimized within an exploitative and racist western culture.
Sellars stages the production like a modern television studio - four metal conference tables, a dozen or so desk chairs, and five very large video monitors - with visible cables and wiring, as well as microphones on stands, before an all-white backdrop. Visually more like C-Span or Court TV than a live theatre stage, Sellars does employ the backdrop for interesting silhouettes of characters and occasionally striking shadow effects. The video monitors are in constant use - moonlight, seashores with rolling surf, the gates of a Belmont estate - and the surroundings of Portia's home are revealed in images of a lush garden, an expansive swimming pool, and a statue of Buddha.
Portia herself - wealthy, elegant and sophisticated - displays a range of emotion like no other character in this predominantly hushed and somber production. She shows genuine anger at the humiliation of the romantic game of choosing caskets, palpable horror at the possibility of anyone but Bassanio emerging victorious among her suitors, and later outrage then resignation at Bassanio's obviously deep - and apparently homoerotic - relationship with the much older merchant, Antonio. Portia also summons the few humorous elements of the play, a rhythmic rap with Nerissa using ghetto expressions and hip-hop dance moves, and later, using a small statue as a phallus to illustrate for Nerissa that they will pretend to be men to save Antonio at his trial. Most importantly, Sellars depicts Portia as the wealthy elite of the modern racially-divided community, with her failed suitor, the Prince of Morocco, shown as an African-American gang lord sporting strings of gold chains, and her female servant - also African-American - singing a surprisingly strong gospel hymn ("tell me where is fancy bred").
The other characters - with the notable exception of Shylock - are less well drawn and characterized only visually. Bassanio is something of a young gigolo, and Antonio - shown in his early scene being videotaped in an interview for a cable-access news program by cousins wearing long shorts, high boots, colorful cotton shirts, and baseball caps - is an elegantly attired, long-haired businessman with a sad voice and an appropriately melancholy air. Shylock's beloved daughter, Jessica, is a spoiled-brat rich girl in bib overalls and dreadlocks, watching television cartoons (significantly, a Japanese-animated escape on a magic carpet) like a child: on her belly, feet waving behind her, face in her hands. The romantic escape from Shylock that Jessica plans with Lorenzo is significantly belied by a non-textual sexual dalliance with Launcelot: she may sincerely desire her freedom, but obviously not for purely true-love romantic reasons.
Paul Butler's dignified ghetto businessman Shylock, beardless in a black suit and tie, lends Sellars' production its only moments of true drama. The "if you prick us do we not bleed?" passage is searing in its intensely controlled (albeit electronically amplified) emotion, and he quite humanly scoffs at the notion of forced conversion to Christianity but cannot hold back a sob at the mention of the loss of his daughter. He exits post-trial with slow dignity, calmly leaving after he crumples Antonio's bond and lets it fall to the floor.
The trial itself, scored with heavily amplified single piano notes for emphasis, is presided over by an elderly white judge who pointedly has his back turned to the audience throughout and speaks in a rumbling monotone from his bench. The monitors show images of the 1992 beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police and the subsequent street rioting after the acquittal of the officers, underscoring - with a notable lack of subtlety - that Shylock is yet another black man denied justice in modern America.
The slowly-paced concluding moments, after nearly four hours of slowly-paced drama, make a more subtle point, with the characters subdued in their hollow victory, knowing they have miscarried justice. Gratiano throws his ring back at Nerissa and storms from the stage, but Antonio humbly and selflessly brings Portia's ring to Bassanio. Bassanio drapes his sport coat over her shoulders, but Portia remains aloof and says nothing as the lights slowly fade on a decidedly unromantic and unhappy conclusion.
Sellars' elaborate audio-visual approach to The Merchant of Venice sounds better than it plays onstage. The very slow delivery of lines amplifies the toneless voices and flattens the poetry into solemn monotones that sound more like reciting than acting, and the fixed cameras make for awkward blocking and unnatural posing, so the production feels more like a staged reading. At its worst a dull self-indulgence, at its best a fascinating mess, this is nonetheless an important production of Merchant, notable for its intellectual concepts and remarkable in its failures of theatrical execution: thought-provoking, yes, but only sometimes interesting, rarely dramatic and never entertaining.