Many an actor has played Shakespeare’s problematic Shylock, the centerpiece of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, since Elizabethan times. Even in “officially” Jew-free England (nominally from 1290–1656, though Sephardic Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition did live there), stereotypes of Shylock the Jew prevailed. Yet relatively rarely has a Jewish actor been cast as Shylock, especially in today’s “cancel culture.” In Playing Shylock, dramatist Mark Leiren-Young’s solo play, actor Saul Rubinek channels this issue.
Rubinek recalls how the Nazis wiped out his family and his father’s dreams of Yiddish theater.
In the opening scene, Rubinek, dressed in Shylock’s garb and replete with side curls, stands onstage at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center (the actual venue). A female voice, heard over the speaker system, announces that the second half of Merchant of Venice is canceled. The show folds in mid-performance, and a furious Rubinek fumes and spews four-letter words to let the theater’s management and the audience know (he addresses them directly) how angry he is about this closing (a situation closer to today’s realities than many would admit).
It’s initially confusing as to whether the cancelation is fictitious. The audience is not here to see Merchant of Venice but rather Playing Shylock; the more Rubinek ruminates about his thwarted desire to play Shylock—to the point where he removes his fake sidelocks—it seems evident that the play has at least a three-pronged mission. First, a frustrated Rubinek rails against an arts establishment whose flimsy reason for canceling his show is ostensibly the “safety” of its audiences, not Jewish content that might not be “politically correct.” Second, he underscores how few Jewish artists have been chosen to play Shylock; and third, he pivots to the Holocaust, the ultimate negation of Jews, contextualizing the catastrophic losses by sharing stories of his large family, most of whom perished under the Nazis.
Under Martin Kinch’s direction, Rubinek’s semi-surreal stage presence vacillates as do his demeanor and mood. He flips seamlessly between rage, resignation, nostalgia, and humor. The latter two are a significant part of what he shares with the audience. The humor allows him to see through and cope with vacuous excuses why Jews and Jewish content get marginalized and often excluded. The nostalgia is not religious, but a retrospective on his ancestors’ deep regard for values and tradition, and, in his father’s case, yearning to play Shylock.
“His Jewish Shylock, as he might have existed in the Venice of his time, speaks in a moving, eloquent, Yiddish-tinged accent of the foreigner.”
Shawn Kerwin’s rendering of Shylock’s Elizabethan period dress is truly incongruous with the contemporary black metal water bottle from which Rubinek sips, yet that incongruity has charm. At times, it seems like Rubinek’s asides to the audience, his cursing, and his informality are spontaneous, and part of an offbeat “outtake” that a privileged few get to see; at other times, he is reminiscent of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, caught in the middle of a story that repeats itself with only slight variations, over and over, and over which they have no control. That story is the fate of the character Shylock the Jew, but also the fate of the Jew who attempts in vain to play him.
Rubinek, as Shylock, demands his pound of flesh and is, instead, forced by the court to convert to Christianity or lose all his property. He may initially utter Shylock’s most famous lines in the mellow tones of “the Queen’s English.” Nevertheless, his Jewish Shylock, as he might have existed in the Venice of his time, speaks in a moving, eloquent, Yiddish-tinged accent of the foreigner—that is the Jew, as outsider--when he utters Shylock’s famous lines:
Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is?
Saul Rubinek, who would have portrayed Shylock, is upset about the theater’s cancellation of the show. Photographs by Dahlia Katz.
Much of the show may seem to hinge on Rubinek’s random, seemingly disconnected stream of consciousness, and forgetfulness, He reinforces the latter by occasionally calling out, “Where was I?” It’s feigned forgetfulness, though, and the way that he delivers his “random” thoughts to the audience are not stream of consciousness, but rather the work of a master actor. Rubinek demonstrates an exceptional emotional range and an uncanny ability to switch from anger--cancel culture, to humor about historical assimilation pressures for Jews—(name changes and nose jobs, both of which Rubinek rejected), to reminiscences of how his religious grandfather reacted to his father’s dream to act in Yiddish theater.
Rubinek is authentic throughout, but at the close, his “Hath not a Jew…” in Yiddish, by the Shylock his father never played, is by far the most moving moment of all.
Playing Shylock runs at Polonsky Shakespeare Center (262 Ashland Place, Brooklyn) through Dec. 7. Performances are at 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays; matinees are at 2 p.m. on Wednesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays. For more information, or to purchase tickets, call (646) 553-3880 or visit playingshylock.com.
Playwright: Mark Leiren-Young
Director: Martin Kinch
Lighting Designer: Jason Hand
Set & Costume Designer: Shawn Kerwin
Sound Designer: Olivia Wheeler
