Delaware Shakespeare presents 'The Merchant of Venice'

Of all Shakespeare’s works, Merchant is one of the most problematic, filled with anti-Semitism, venality, and anger. It must be tempting to gloss over its polarizing elements, but director David Stradley leads his actors to meet them head on. The troupe performs this work 14 times in challenging or visually uninspiring locales — community centers, prisons, hospitals — for audiences possibly unschooled in (or even wary of) Shakespeare.

'The Jew of Venice'

The “merchant” of the title is Antonio (Gregory Isaac), a highly regarded Venetian whose trading ventures find him short of ready cash. His money-strapped friend Bassanio (Newton Buchanan) asks for funds to travel and woo “fair Portia” (Liz Filios). So Antonio seeks a short-term loan from Jewish moneylender Shylock (Kirk Wendell Brown), who fiercely guards his ducats and his daughter Jessica (Michaela Shuchman). Meanwhile, Portia, aided by lady-in-waiting Nerissa (Tai Verley), fields a gaggle of suitors.

Jessica escapes and, with Bassanio and his friends (Wilfredo Amill, Cameron DelGrosso, and Emily Schuman), sails for Belmont. Antonio’s trading ventures are ruined, Shylock demands the “pound of flesh” he set as the merchant’s bond, and Portia, disguised as a lawyer, resolves all. Shylock is disgraced and lovers are reunited — perhaps happily, perhaps not so much.

Shakespeare tellingly set his play in Venice, which Elizabethans saw as rife with licentiousness and corruption, a city whose now-storied aura carried a very different resonance then. As Stradley noted in a preshow orientation, Jews expelled from England in the 13th century settled in Venice, where many became bankers because they were banned from practicing other occupations.

Shakespeare originally titled this The Jew of Venice, and the play is an extraordinarily nuanced response to The Jew of Malta, the one-dimensional melodrama by his rival Christopher Marlowe. The superior playwright pivots his plot around a tangle of love and money to create simultaneous conflicting emotions.

Stradley’s production creatively exploits Shakespeare’s polarized, twisted strands. Strong and moving, it doesn’t shy away from controversy as it acknowledges and then explores the work’s moral, amoral, and dramatic juxtapositions.

A heartbreaking Shylock

The show opens with an almost childlike physicality that draws the audience into Elizabethan language and conventions, and even in its darkness there are comic turns. Its compelling intensity is quickly set by the fiery first-act meeting between Antonio and Shylock, whose mutual hatred springs from both religious and professional enmity.

Though the character of Antonio can be a mere plot device, Isaac is forceful and compelling. In their confrontations he and Brown, matched in passion and eloquence, fuel the play’s impact.

As Shylock — one of the Bard’s great roles — Brown is riveting and heartbreaking. An outsider longing for inclusion and justice, his Shylock becomes a truly tragic hero shaped by alienation, honed in hatred, and ultimately broken by great loss.

In this strong, passionate, multiracial, multiethnic company, nine actors play 17 roles. The only characters represented by a single actor are Shylock, Bassanio, and Portia, whom Filios winningly portrays as longing for love in spite of her strong-willed eloquence. In the “quality of mercy” courtroom speech, her understated strength and steely resolve build to a forceful climax.

Stradley’s clear, focused direction renders accessible Shakespeare’s powerful words. Filios and Schuman have created an effective soundscape with haunting original music. Kierceton Keller’s costumes allow for swift character changes, and sculptor David Meyer’s effective set pieces do the same for locales.

So how can a gym or a cafeteria with folding seats and fluorescent lighting transport us to Renaissance-era Venice? Unexpectedly, this straightforward presentation — with actors inches away and fully engaged with the audience — is tremendously moving.

Like all good Shakespeare, this Merchant of Venice is filled with the constant surprise of beautiful wordcraft, but Stradley and his troupe have also created a production that longs for communication, something both precious and increasingly rare.