Summary 
Superb modernization to 1920s New York with scenes effectively staged at the Hamptons and on Wall Street. Businessmen and flappers, cigars and cigarettes, parties and liquor abound, and Shylock subsists within a disturbing milieu of greed and vanity, intolerance and hatred. Excellent concepts, stylishly executed.
Design
Directed by Barbara Gaines. Set by Neil Patel. Costumes by Nan Cibula-Jenkins. Lights by Robert Christen. Sound by Robert Neuhaus. Original songs and music by Alaric Jans.
Cast
Roger Mueller (Antonio), Scott Parkinson (Salerio), Peter Aylward (Solanio), David New (Bassanio), Martin Yurek (Lorenzo), Brad Armacost (Gratiano), Jennifer Erin Roberts (Portia), Susan Hart (Nerissa), Richard Russell Ramos (Shylock), Jeffrey Hughes (Launcelot), Susan Moniz (Jessica), Neil Friedman (Arragon/Tubal/Duke).
Analysis
Director Barbara Gaines sets her production of The Merchant of Venice within the teeming New York financial district of the Roaring Twenties. The choice proves ingenious, with the greedy post-war American locale underscoring the play's themes extremely well. Gaines envisions the characters as being, for the most part, overfed, money-grubbing hypocrites who conceal their shallowness beneath a veneer of propriety and opulence.
Gaines begins the production with the colorful pandemonium of a celebratory party of wealthy Christians. Cigar-smoking businessmen wear tuxedoes with top hats and tails, and their "flapper" wives and girlfriends wear glittery evening dresses. They all dance the Charleston, are served martinis with olives by a slew of bustling servants, and a few take a seat upon a swing that carries them over the heads of the audience. On the party's fringe, the melancholy and portly Antonio stands out in his garish red tuxedo.
This sense of soul-crushing affluence continues during subsequent scenes. Jennifer Erin Roberts as Portia confers with Nerissa during a 1.2 beach-party at the Hamptons, Long Island. The two converse amid four vacuous friends, each attired in a differently colored bathing suit, with cap, robe, and knee socks. A supposedly serious discussion of Portia's father's will and the three mysterious caskets is decidedly undercut and made to seem bloated and vain by the image of the six lounging women batting around a beach ball while servants bring them colorful drinks and light their cigarettes.
A stuffy 1.3 takes place within the darkly marbled financial center of Wall Street. A large clock looms over three doors flanked by huge square columns within a solemn, black-and-gray building lobby. Urban street noise intrudes when the doors open. Businessmen march about with an air of importance, including the urbane and dapper Bassanio - looking as if he has stepped directly from The Great Gatsby - and the white-bearded Richard Russell Ramos as a small, slender Shylock. Shylock wears a Jewish cap and a vested gray suit with watch and fob. Ramos presents the moneylender as austere and embittered, frowning and pinched in manner and speech. His darkly lit 2.5 scene within his office - working late, apparently as usual, with a sandwich and a glass of wine - sympathetically reveals his determination and work-ethic as well as his cold-heartedness, as his daughter Jessica prepares to leave him.
Ramos' Shylock, as slight as he is, shows a Napoleanic as well as underdog penchant for conflict and violence, at times understandably but at other times repellently. At one point he squares off and prepares to come to blows with the fatuous Lorenzo; later, he snatches a newspaper from a condescending Salerio and raises a hand to strike the man; but when Antonio pleads for his life, grasping with desperation at Shylock's clothing, Ramos shoves him aside with disgust.
Gaines only briefly lightens the unrelenting hypocrisies and visual blacks and grays. Excellent supporting performances provide the only comic relief in this obviously problematic "comedy." Launcelot delivers his 2.2 soliloquy on running away from his father as a debate with himself while he gnaws a foot-long hot dog purchased from a street vendor, and the mannered Prince of Arragon is portrayed with a flamboyantly comic turn. The Prince struts prissily onstage for his 2.9 choice of caskets, flinging hat, gloves and cane to nearby servants, and punctuating his terse and heavily-accented speech with finger-snaps. His claim to not "yump" with common spirits brings laughter, as does his droll commentary on the "blinking idiot" he sees reflected at him in the silver.
An omnipresent Gratiano manages to bring moments of humor while also reinforcing the sense of swollen decadence that infests the Christian characters. He wears a white suit and a jaunty beret, and with frequent not-too-discrete swigs from a hidden flask, he lurches and staggers in a constant state of inebriation. Gratiano even plays bagpipes at one point, and during the lengthy trial scene, his cheerleader-like taunts and cries are superficially humorous, but at their core, quite ugly, like most of the characters in the production.
The 4.1 trial is a tour de force for Roberts' Portia, with the actress rising to the challenge with considerable grace and skill. Roberts commands the stage with her presence, as she stands tall, elegant and erudite in red robe and wire-rimmed glasses. The scene begins with a brief piano interlude segueing into martial drumbeats, and bailiffs march about the stage like soldiers in a firing squad. Chairs are set up on and offstage, all facing the court and Portia at elevated center stage.
Flanked by a chain-smoking and bespectacled Nerissa - dressed in a three piece pin-striped suit and bow-tie with a pencil behind one ear - Roberts manages to be at once impassioned and by-the-book. The subtle dichotomy between Portia's apparently heroic arguments for justice seasoned with mercy versus her self-serving motivations and obvious bigotry present the crux of Gaines' conception of the play.
Portia's ultimate defeat of Shylock is nonetheless stirring, as it is intended to be, despite the sometimes glaring intolerance and double standard. Shylock, who menacingly whets his knife on the sole of his shoe during much of the discourse, resists the arguments with a self-destructive obstinacy that seems perfectly natural for the caustic character. As the jocular Gratiano shouts caustic condemnations, Shylock is commanded to crawl upon his hands and knees before he is permitted to rise and accept his fate.
Afterward, the Christians - joined by the always politely distant "infidel" Jew, Jessica, who is supposedly one of them but is clearly an outsider - celebrate in an extended Act 5 denouement that reeks of more moral rot and arrogance, again carefully concealed by manners and opulence. In front of a shimmering, blue-lit scrim, the victors gather beside a rectangular swimming pool at center stage. A piano, accompanied by bass and violin, plays in the background. The business of Bassanio's and Gratiano's rings seems shallow and smug, just as Gaines has intended it to be, and when the three couples finally pair off for a happy ending, the Charleston begins again, and wild dancing ensues.
In a haunting final image, the dancers freeze and the music stops for a brief moment. A looming silhouette of Shylock, praying with his head bowed and covered in a prayer shawl, becomes visible high on the scrim behind the dancers, then fades as the dancing resumes. The affectation of New York City during the hey-day of the Roaring Twenties makes a highly effective and thought-provoking setting for The Merchant of Venice. A great deal of credit is due Gaines for her sharply focused and complex treatment of this difficult and disturbing play, which raises nagging questions within its audience.
Note: A version of this article was edited and published in Shakespeare Bulletin, Vol.16, No.2, Spring 1998.