The Stanford Theatre Activist Mobilization Project, better known as STAMP, is putting on Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice next week. Director Morielle Stroethoff, ’12, a fellow English major, has set the show in a modern context in the Bay Area. This week, Cellar Door caught up with Morielle to ask her about her vision of the show and the directing process.
What is your favourite thing about Merchant of Venice? And your least favourite?
Let’s do my favourite first. To me, Merchant of Venice represents a perfect marriage between comedy and drama. The world of the play is a dark and troubled one, much like our own. As an audience member, it is hard to watch misunderstanding evolve into cruelty, especially when it happens between characters in whom we see so much of ourselves. But Shakespeare didn’t write Merchant of Venice purely to push his audiences into asking tough questions about their beliefs, he also wrote it to bring some laughter into this sad world. A play that probes your thoughts and makes you smile? I can’t imagine anything better than that. And Merchant does it so well!
My least favourite thing about Merchant of Venice is the Prince of Morocco. Not the Prince of Morocco in my production, he’s possibly the most hilarious thing to hit our stage — I mean the Prince of Morocco in the original version. See, in Shakespeare’s text, Morocco is black. Portia prejudges him as unworthy of her love because of this before she even meets him. Of course, this is not a problem for the play–Portia has a slew of faults, adding racism to the list merely broadens the scope of the play’s commentary–but the fact that the only dark-skinned character of the play becomes its greatest laughing-stock is an issue for performance. You can’t make Morocco funny without being offensive, so all non-offensive productions of the play have a very bland Morocco.
Fortunately, I was able to side-step this issue because our production is meant to highlight questions of religion and interfaith dialogue. We cut discussion of Morocco’s race entirely from the script. As you will see, this gave me the freedom to take him to a hilarious extreme.
What was your biggest challenge in directing the play?
I think my biggest challenge was to make sure I didn’t push the comedy too far. Of course, we have a great deal of fun in rehearsal–I almost always devolve into uncontrollable giggles at some point–but the main subject matter of the show is incredibly heavy. For example, while I want to poke fun at some of Bassanio’s ridiculousness in early scenes, I don’t want that to keep the audience from taking him seriously in the trial scene, where the dramatic stakes are incredibly high for him.
In the end, I aimed for a place where we can see characters like Bassanio as silly flawed people we can laugh at and with, but who also seem like real complex humans with whom we can empathize.
What has been the best rehearsal moment so far?
I’ll share a funny blooper moment. During the designer run, Portia and Bassanio’s kiss was more passionate than they’d ever done it before. As their lips parted, when Portia was supposed to go into one of her famous speeches, all she could manage to say was “Uhhh…Line!”
What do you want the audience to know?
Merchant of Venice was written in a time when religious differences were written all over peoples faces and clothes. Portia’s line, “Which is the merchant here and which the Jew?” was just plain absurd because only an idiot (or someone who had grown up on an island) could possibly fail to identify a Jew by his or her outward appearance.
By setting our production in the San Francisco business sector of today, we completely changed the meaning of that (and many other) lines. Today, some religious people wear clothing or jewelry to signify their religion, but these signals could also point to cultural affiliation and have nothing to do with religion. You cannot know until you ask. Heidi Thorsen, the producer, and I feel that, for the most part, religion is a taboo discussion topic at Stanford. I’ve seen people get hurt because of lack of openness and understanding. We hope the play will inspire you to ask questions and to share.
What is the biggest risk you’re taking in the play?
I think what I’m in danger of receiving the most criticism for is the modern dress. It’s been done so much and it’s become boring and cliche. Yes, it highlights the most universal aspects of plays and characters, but it also creates lots of annoying inconsistencies. Can’t you just trust an audience to find universality in a historicist production of a show?
To this question, I would say yes and no. Historicist Shakespeare is great. It provides an excellent forum for me to find the relation between my life and what I see on stage across historical boundaries. But when actors and director spend weeks working with a text, constantly finding ways to breathe contemporary motivations into the ancient words, they can find so much more than an audience member who sees the play only once. Modern dress allows us to push the text so much further into the issues of our time. It makes the play more provocative, disturbing, and–yes–annoying. But annoying, I think, in a good way. Watching an old story re-envisioned in the present day gives audience members the chance to really sense those things that are nothing like their own lives.
A good example is the way that Shylock is constantly called “Jew”. We don’t tend to do that at Stanford. But I’ve heard countless conversations in which a religious belief or group is mercilessly mocked, much in the way Launcelot and Salanio laugh about Shylock’s beliefs. Seeing the play in modern dress gives the audience member the exercise of figuring out where the language resonates with the society in which the action takes place and where it seems to grate against that society. I think this is something unique that only modern dress Shakespeare can do, and we’ve been working hard to fill Merchant with creative choices to become food for audience thought.
Merchant of Venice runs January 26, 27, + 28 @ 7 pm in The Nitery Theater; FREE. Reserve your ticket here.