Putting a spotlight on a stereotype

For actor and director, 'Merchant' is a personal challenge

Jeremiah Kissel (in black, as Shylock) and Stephen Benson (as the Duke of Venice) rehearse at Midway Studios. (Essdras M. Suarez/Globe Staff)

The trial is about to begin.

The cast has gathered in a former dock warehouse to rehearse "The Merchant of Venice," and it is time for the Duke of Venice to summon Shylock.

"Go one, and call the Jew into the court," barks actor Stephen Benson to an attendant.

But it's not enough for the director, Melia Bensussen, who interrupts the action and strides onto the makeshift stage, a brick-walled space with oak beams and steel pillars at Midway Studios in Fort Point Channel.

"Hate the Jew more," she says. "Hate him more."

Over four centuries, actors and audiences have struggled with this famous, and famously ugly, Shakespeare play. It has been celebrated and condemned, performed and protested, revised and rethought.

And perhaps no community has spent as much time revisiting the story of Shylock than the Jewish community, which, staging after staging, must confront the best-known depiction of a Jew in theater.

The play, of course, tells the story of a Venetian merchant, Antonio, who borrows from a Jewish moneylender, Shylock, with the agreement that should Antonio default on the loan, he will repay Shylock with a pound of his own flesh. The charac ters are relentlessly anti-Semitic; Shylock, in turn, is an angry and vengeful victim/villain who, at the beginning, watches his daughter spirit away to marry a Christian and who, in the end, is humiliated and forced to convert to Christianity himself.

"The moment Jews entered Western society, they had to struggle with this, because Shakespeare is the backbone of the literary canon, and Shylock is the most famous Jew in the history of English-language culture," says Edna Nahshon, an expert on Jewish theater and performance at the Jewish Theological Seminary who is researching a book about Jewish responses to the play.

"Whatever came after, whatever Jew was on the European stage, was seen, somehow, as connected to, or in the shadow of Shylock," Nahshon says. "Very often there's a tendency to forget that it's a fictive character."

Now comes the Actors' Shakespeare Project, a four-year-old Boston-based company that worked its way through 14 other works by the Bard of Avon before tackling this production, which opened last night. In so doing, it has made a conscious, although not unprecedented, choice: It hired practicing Jews to direct and to play the role of Shylock.

The director, Bensussen, grew up in the cloistered Jewish community of Mexico City, attending a bilingual (Spanish and Hebrew) Jewish day school where the uniform included sweaters with Jewish stars that the students wore inside-out when off school grounds. Eventually, during a period of unrest in Mexico, her parents moved to California.

The actor, Jeremiah Kissel, grew up in the Bronx and was educated at a yeshiva in Manhattan; his mother was an immigrant who was just 17 when she fled to England from Nazi Germany, and his own exposure to anti-Semitism came while working as a waiter in a restaurant where the chef frequently used derisive epithets as a form of humor and a co-worker once referred to him as "a lowly Jew."

Both are now active in the local Jewish community; Bensussen is a member of Temple Israel, a Reform congregation in Boston, while Kissel belongs to Temple Emunah, a Conservative congregation in Lexington, where he not only worships but also occasionally reads from the Torah.

Their version of "The Merchant of Venice" looks from rehearsals likely to be unstinting, harsh, jarring. The characters will dress in contemporary clothing and speak in their own accents, as if the events in the play could happen today. And there will be no softening of Shakespeare's lines. Not only is Bensussen keeping the racist language that is sometimes excised, in which Portia rejects the Prince of Morocco over his complexion, but she cast a black actor to play that role. She says she insisted on casting a Jewish man to play Shylock because she thought a non-Jewish actor would be too cautious to fully explore the character's dark side. Bensussen also intends to emphasize the role of money and the issue of indebtedness - a decision she had made even before a real-world credit crunch caused global stock markets to tank, making the play's theme of loans gone bad far more topical than the troupe had anticipated.

"On a very personal level, this play has been a challenge to me," Bensussen says in an interview before rehearsal. "I directed it in '93, and I shied away from the hard edges. I was afraid to do the play as written and worked very hard to sentimentalize the play, to soften the difficulties. And then this became a personal haunting. Is it because I'm Jewish that I can't tackle this?"

Kissel says simply, "Shylock is a role that I've had in my imagination for quite a long time. You don't turn it down if you get a chance."

He says the idea that the character of Shylock could engender anti-Semitism "means nothing to me at all. I'm inside the play now." He adds that he understands Shylock's anger at a community that discriminated against him and conspired to separate him from his daughter; Kissel says if someone similarly attempted to separate him from his son, "I would end up hating that guy."

When his character is called anti-Semitic names, Kissel says, "I find it very offensive, but, as with most racial epithets, the older I get, the more I feel, when I hear someone say something like that, it does not reflect on the object of the scorn, it reflects on the speaker.

"Almost all the characters are ridiculous anti-Semites, but I don't think Shakespeare concealed the ridiculousness of that."

For years, scholars have argued about whether the play is intended to be an expression of anti-Semitism or a condemnation of anti-Semitism, with no consensus.

"I spent six or seven years looking into every scrap of information about what Shakespeare and his contemporaries thought about Jews, and I can't tell you what Shakespeare thought, or whether the play is one in which Jews are demonized or not," said James S. Shapiro, a professor of English at Columbia University and the author of "Shakespeare and the Jews."

"If Shakespeare wanted to write sermons, he would have been a preacher, but he writes plays, and plays wrestle with questions, rather than provide easy answers."

In its first iterations, in Elizabethan England - a nation from which the Jews had officially been expelled in 1290 - Shylock was often played by actors wearing red fright wigs and false noses. The play was performed multiple times in Hitler's Germany, Shapiro says, often adapted to emphasize Shylock's villainy and to remove the story line about intermarriage, which offended Nazi sensibilities.

The play's power to influence stereotypes about Jews is hard to overstate. For example, Katharine Graham, the wealthy Washington Post publisher who was baptized a Lutheran and whose family had a pew in an Episcopal church, recounts in her memoir that once, when her father was in a dispute with another newspaper publisher over control of some comic strips, the other publisher sent Graham's father a piece of raw meat with a note explaining that the gesture was an allusion to Shylock's demand for a pound of flesh.

Actors began portraying Shylock more sympathetically in the late 19th century, and that carried over to multiple stagings in Yiddish theater, which tended to emphasize the over-the-top anti-Semitism heaped upon Shylock and his grief at the intermarriage of his daughter. But after the Holocaust, the play became so controversial that some argued it should no longer be produced. In 1962 in New York, rabbinic leaders raised a huge outcry against the televising of Joseph Papp's production in Central Park, and over the years the play was gradually dropped from many school curricula in favor of less loaded works such as "Romeo and Juliet."

But many theaters have continued to explore the play. The American Repertory Theatre staged it in its 1998 season, and the play has been filmed multiple times, most notably on TV in 1973 with Laurence Olivier as Shylock and on film in 2004 with Al Pacino in the role.

"It's a brilliant play - disturbing and powerful, marvelously written, and totally compelling, but you can't clean this one up - it's very disturbing material - and in a situation in which there is a tinderbox, you might think twice about doing it," says Stephen Greenblatt, a humanities professor at Harvard and an expert on Shakespeare. "But the Jewish community in America today is strong and vigorous and perfectly capable of processing this."

Michael Paulson is the Globe's religion reporter. He blogs about religion at www.boston.com/religion, and can be reached by e-mail at mpaulson@globe.com