Making Merchant

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Left: Jennifer Phillips, as Portia, reacts to the less-than-desirable courting by the Prince of Morocco, played by Yosha Ellis, in RCC’s production.

May 04, 2008

By Bill Varble

Mail Tribune

It's sprinkling rain as acting students crowd into a former furniture warehouse where a karate class is breaking up. The occasion is the first complete run-through of Rogue Community College's 2008 play, "The Merchant of Venice." The lights and sound board are ready, an abstract set is up on one side of the room, karate mats stacked nearby.

"See what we get," Ron Danko says. "The hai! hai!"

William Shakespeare's comedy about a Jewish moneylender who wants a pound of flesh from a Christian merchant, and the young woman who defeats him, is difficult enough.

But try it with cast members who have day jobs and kids, on a budget of almost nothing, in a space where you set up and take down the stage almost every time you use it because you share the space.

Each spring co-directors John Cole and Ron Danko and a motley cast of students commit magic: They put on a play.

Last year it was "The Mad Woman of Chaillot."

"That was easy compared to this," Danko says.

"There is a whole lot of projection going on in this play," says Cole, who teaches humanities at RCC. "Sometimes it's so bright, it's hard to see at all."

You follow Cole into the costume room/junk storage/dressing room, where costumes are hung in a long, narrow, L-shaped, cubicle whose cinder block walls are painted dark red. A row of light bulbs blazes above a row of mirrors, and hats and wigs line a high shelf.

Erika Fair brushes foundation makeup on the face of Jesse Boutin, who is playing Solanio. Boutin, 34, of Talent, has gone back to school to study video production after a series of unrewarding jobs. Fair, 19, of Medford, is a student at the Oregon Institute of Cosmetology and a volunteer makeup tech. She adds setting powder atop Boudin's foundation and mascara to blacken his moustache.

Rob Hirschboeck, playing Shylock, tries a yarmulke on for size. Dayvin Turchiano, a Long Island native playing Bassanio, works with actors on their New York accents, since the play is set in contemporary New York.

Watching the set go up, Danko says he and Cole have a twofold task: to teach acting, and to teach Shakespeare.

"At first reading, some had no sense of verse, or meaning," he says. "It's come a long way. What we do is, we hook 'em."

u u

Danko had trouble sleeping after he and Cole cut 490 lines from the play (two quarto texts and the First Folio text exist, but none is definitive). Did he worry that lines needed to be restored?

"No. I thought we needed to cut more."

"Merchant" forces tough choices on directors. It plays like a comedy, and a spirit of generosity triumphs over Shylock's greed, and love conquers all. But Shylock is a villain. But Jew-baiting is not the point. But the Christians are anti-semitic. But if Shylock is too sympathetic you create other problems.

An Oregon Shakespeare Festival production in 1991 prompted a public outcry, so the OSF organized a public relations effort around a 2001 production in which Shylock was a non-observant Jew, and there was not so much ado.

Minutes before the run-through, Morgan Smith, who is playing Lorenzo, approaches Danko.

"I felt like a stage hand all in black," he says. "I need a jacket."

He leaves, comes back in a jacket, black.

"Wear it," says Cole.

Most of these actors have real jobs. Some go to school part time. Many are parents. One crew member had chemotherapy during rehearsals.

Hirschboeck, who heard about the play and auditioned, has an acting background that includes Berkeley Rep and the Colorado Shakespeare Festival. Turchiano has a theater degree and has performed on area stages.

Scenic designer Karl Brake teaches art at RCC. With a little help from his students, he put together a Cubist backdrop that becomes a different skyline each time you see it. Costume designers Janet Eshoo and Shawn Fennell raided people's closets, made trips to Goodwill.

"Having some people from the community join the class is very cool," Cole says. "The hardest single thing is everybody's schedule. Second is scheduling the building — and creating the illusion it's a black box theater."

Cole and Danko talked about the play at length with the cast. What are its origins? What does it mean to keep your word? To break it? What are the dynamics of the play's anti-Semitism?

"We talked about complexity," Cole says. "There's no black and white."

The directors view Shylock as a victim of a very specific kind of racism in which people force him to be that which they despise. They need him yet project their fears onto him. He must betray his faith to exact revenge, although, ironically, he's the only guy in the play who can keep a commitment.

"These Christians are bad," Cole says. "Why can't a Jew be bad, too?"

He calls the play "wildly prismatic, absurdly comedic, terribly tragic, and of course, romantically magic ... "

In the end, he says, Shakespeare asks us to face our own perceptions of religion, race, and revenge.

"No one comes out clean in a world where religion becomes perverted to racism, and commerce is king," he says.

u u

Nearly two dozen people form a circle and hold hands.

"What I'd like you to do is focus on your reality," Cole says, "Your truth in the show. We're gonna run through without stops."

"Let's move the language," Danko says. "Let's not sit on things."

"It's still rehearsal," Turchiano says. "We can try a few more things?"

"Sure," Danko says.

"We can do this!" actors cry as one on the count of three.

The house lights go down, stage lights come up.

Antonio, Salarino and Solanio are hanging out in a Turkish bath, clad in white towels, steam rising. They speak the familiar lines in New Yawk accents.

"In soot' I know not why I am so sad," begins Robert Day as Antonio.

"My mind cooling my broth would blow me to an ague when I thought what hahm a wind too great might do at sea," says Andy Atkinson, playing Salarino.

Danko and Cole sit to one side taking notes.

Antonio assures Bassanio he'll borrow the money to support his friend's lavish courtship of Portia, a rich heiress.

In the second scene the lights come up on Portia (Jennifer Phillips). Portia makes like a typical ingenue.

"By my troth, Nerissa, my little body is aweary of this great world," she says in a honeyed voice.

She must marry the man who makes the right choice among three caskets, the one containing her father's consent to the marriage.

As she considers her suitors — a Neapolitan prince, a French lord, an English baron, a Scottish lord, a German duke — Phillips slips easily into the appropriate accent for each man.

Cole and Danko smile.

In the third scene Antonio and Bassanio ask Shylock for the loan, although Antonio has often spat on Shylock on the street for being a Jew. Rob Hirschboeck plays the villain with no hint of mustache-twirling

"Three thousand ducats," he says. "Well."

"Ay, sir," says Turchiano/Bassanio, "for three months."

"For three months — well ..."

"The Merchant of Venice" plays opens Friday, May 9, and plays May 10, 11, 16, 17 and 18.

Reach reporter Bill Varble at 776-4478 or e-mail bvarble@mailtribune.com.

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