Word: merchantable
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...rich merchant's son named Fuqui (played by Ge You, who won the best-actor prize at the Cannes festival this year) waters the local casino tables with his father's fortune. Fuqui is a cool dude in line for comeuppance, and he soon learns humility the hard way; it arrives like a 30- ( year plague. He and his wife (Gong Li) are bankrupted, then branded as decadent curs. But the pestilence is not localized; every family suffers. In the '60s, doctors are locked up, leaving the hospitals in the control of those bullying incompetents, the Red Guards. All that...
...captured by Palestinian hijackers who ultimately killed a wheelchair-bound New York man by throwing him overboard. The 23,478 ton ship -- owned by a Genoa-based Starlauro -- burned and seemed likely to sink 130 miles south of the Horn of Africa as passengers and crew boarded merchant ships on the scene for the rescue.Post your opinion on theInternationalbulletin board...
...sober matter of staging Shakespeare, such audaciousness is hard to resist -- though a lot of Chicago theatergoers have been able to. Typically, a third of the people who show up at the Goodman Theatre to see Sellars' ingenious reworking of The Merchant of Venice walk out before the evening is over. It's no mystery why: the evening isn't over for nearly four hours (and this is one of Shakespeare's relatively short plays). Beyond that, the production pretty much upends everything the audience has come to expect from one of Shakespeare's most troubling but reliably entertaining comedies...
...teeming, multicultural world of 1994 Venice Beach, California, where Sellars lives when he isn't setting Don Giovanni in Spanish Harlem, putting King Lear in a Lincoln Continental or deconstructing other classic plays and operas. Shylock, along with the play's other Jews, is black. Antonio, the merchant of the title, and his kinsmen are Latinos. Portia, the wealthy maiden being wooed by Antonio's friend Bassanio, is Asian. But the racial shuffling is just one of Sellars' liberties. The stage is furnished with little but office furniture, while video screens simulcast the actors in close-up during their monologues...
Wrongheaded and tortuous as this Merchant sometimes is, the updating is witty and apt. The "news of the Rialto" becomes fodder for a pair of gossip reporters on a happy-talk TV newscast. Shylock's trial is presided over by a mumbling, superannuated judge who could have stepped right out of Court TV. With a few exceptions -- Elaine Tse's overwrought Portia, for instance -- the actors strike a nice balance between Shakespeare's poetry and Sellars' stunt driving. For the rest of us, it's a wild ride...