Word: shylock
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...been transplanted from the teeming, multicultural world of 15th century Venice, Italy, to the 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...
...perversity, but the real shock of Sellars' production is how well it works both theatrically and thematically. The racial casting, for instance, is a brilliant way of defusing the play's anti-Semitism -- turning it into a metaphor for prejudice and materialism in all its forms. Paul Butler plays Shylock with basso-profundo self-assurance; he's a hardhearted ghetto businessman who, even when he is humiliated at the end, never loses his cool or stoops for pity...
...title role is played by Geraldine James, who starred in the TV series The Jewel in the Crown and onstage as Portia to Hoffman's Shylock. But most of the time she and the rest of the cast wear masks, as the Greeks would have done. This helps ensure that the real star of the play is the play, which may be the most cunning blend ever of high moral purpose and low humor. Its premise is that war-weary women of Greece convene and vow to give up sex until their men give up battle. That is no small...
...reasons," he says in the preface, "I have had to alter a number of facts in this book." In the preface, Roth the author is already mixing it up with Roth the character, confusing what is real and what is fictional, what is altered and what is hallucinatory. Operation Shylock: A Confession plays a steady game of doubled identities and Roth the author supports the truth of the volume "out of uniform," so to speak, in interviews where he claims again that the whole thing is true. Not until the reader gets to the disclaimer...
Roth the author (the guy who actually lives in Connecticut) spendidly puts together a farcical spy tale, a post-modern identity crisis and a reading of modern Jewish life. Operation Shylock humor never fails and the narrative bursts with irony. The insistance on plot veracity might seem heavy-handed by the end, but the twists never lack ingenuity. Nothing here sounds stupid or farfetched, even though it is unlikely that any of it happened...