Sellars is not one of those ““Look, Ma, no play!’’ directors. His aim is to get to the essence of the work, the truth that drove Shakespeare or Mozart in the first place. Sellars, who lives in Venice, Calif., saw ““The Merchant’’ resonating with the racial and economic cleavages that set off the Rodney King riots. He cast black actors as Shylock and the Jews, Latinos as Antonio and the Venetians, and Asians as Portia and her retinue. This is not some ““affirmative action’’ casting move, it’s Sellars’s attempt to cre-ate a synthesis between the world of the play and our world.
It works, on the Goodman’s bare stage, occupied only by tables, chairs, microphones and nine TV monitors. Some of the actors have camcorders with which they shoot the action, so that the audience can watch in full stage and close-up. The results are often stunning: screens multiply the face of Shylock (Paul Butler) as he speaks, in a bloodcurdling low tone of frustrated anger, ““Hath not a Jew eyes . . . organs . . . dimensions . . . ?’’ The familiar speeches pour from the largely youthful cast with a fresh sense of primal urgency.
Sellars sees the mercantile culture of the play as the precursor of our global culture in which money dictates relationships. The Christians spurned Shylock as a usurer, but they needed him. Now we have a credit-driven economy with the Federal Reserve as a super-Shylock setting the rates. Without disturbing a word of Shakespeare’s text, Sellars makes new connections and ups the emotional ante, intensifying the sexual voltage in the classic Renaissance male friendship between Antonio (Geno Silva) and Bassanio (John Ortiz). When Portia (Elaine Tse) disguises herself as a lawyer before the trial scene, she goes into a brutally funny takeoff of macho attitude, from crotch-grabbing to rap rhythms. The outrageous Sellars has given us a ““Merchant’’ that is both intensely American and Shakespearean. The outrage is in the courage.
Chicago’s steppenwolf theatre Company is presenting an explosive production of A Clockwork Orange, based on the late Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novella and Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film. Directed by Terry Kinney, a cofounder of Steppenwolf, the staging is brilliant in its kinetic force. Like book and movie, the play projects youth-gang violence into a futuristic vision of pervasive mayhem by gangs of ““droogs’’ who rape and maim with affectless elan. Droog leader Alex (K. Todd Freeman) and his mates speak in their own argot called Nadsat, a mixture of Russian and English teenage slang: ““viddy’’ means see, ““malchik’’ is boy, ““gulliver’’ is head. These skinheads dressed in motley gear hang out at their surreal pad decorated by the hanging carcass of a cow and cruise the blighted cityscape for victims. Nabbed by the equally brutal cops, Alex is subjected to ““aversion therapy,’’ in which he’s drugged so that when he’s shown films of extreme violence and sex he’s overcome by gag-ging nausea.
This Orwellian cure is worse than the disease, turning Alex into a machine (a clockwork orange) incapable of choosing between good and evil. Burgess’s original idea of behavior modification has been succeeded by the more sophisticated prospect of genetic manipulation: there’s an oddly old-fashioned, mad-scientist aura to the play. More oddly still, the scenes of the most extreme violence have a chilly, distant quality. ““A Clockwork Orange’’ has become a very strange period piece; its vision has been eclipsed by the reality of our time as transmitted by ubiquitous media. The nightly news, from local streets to Sarajevo, is scarier than what Burgess and Kinney are showing us. ““A Clockwork Orange’’ has become a show, a marvelous piece of theatrical virtuosity that somehow detonates without disturbing.
