Al Wants a Pound of Flesh, And He Usually Gets It

JOAN MARCUS

Al Pacino (right) plays Shylock in this Central Park production of Shakespeare's controversial play. The cast also includes Lily Rabe (left) as Portia and Byron Jennings as Antonio.

Al Pacino is not the only reason to try and see the Shakespeare in the Park version of The Merchant of Venice. He's great, but so is the entire cast, half of whom I recognized from at least one television sitcom, including Jesse Tyler Ferguson from my current favorite Modern Family.

Part of the pleasure of this production is that the language and the plot are made so accessible by the actors. They all enunciate wildly. And the production itself, thankfully, does not try to change the setting to war torn Europe or Venice 2000, or some other unnecessarily futuristic landscape. Granted it's hard to listen to the tirades against "the Jew" (Shylock) by the Christians (the rest of the characters) with a politically correct, 21st century sensibility. That is why the play is so seldom performed, which is a shame, because while it may bring into focus the accepted anti-semitism of Shakespeare's time, my interpretation is that it doesn't condone it. Shylock is too complex a character for that.

Also, Portia is one of the smartest most fully developed female characters in any play I've ever seen outside of a Wendy Wasserstein play. And Lily Rabe who plays her is the best member of the cast by far; Al was good, but a couple of times when he starts to rant I couldn't help feeling like he was doing a Jewish version of the colonel in Scent of A Woman.

One piece of advice. Bring your own snacks and drinks because the line at the snack bar at intermission is so long that only the NYC marathon runners at the front got served before the Second Act.