I saw a professional production (at an acclaimed Shakespearean summer repertory that my family had been going to for years) that also dressed Shylock up like a Hasid--and gave him a "Yiddish" accent to boot. They then played the courtroom scene in which Shylock's life is destroyed for laughs.
Worse, I had specifically asked my parents to go see this particular production, because I have a certain fascination with the play and, having seen the same repertory handle the problematic racism and sexism issues in Othello and The Taming of the Shrew with finesse and tact in previous seasons, I thought I could trust them to give the antisemitism in Merchant the same treatment.
I have never, ever been so ashamed. I was up the entire night crying, and I will remember the way that other audience members stared at my family as we left (I was wearing a very obvious Magen David necklace) for the rest of my life. To this day I wish I had walked out.
When I returned to college that fall, my tech theater professor began the term by asking each of us to talk about a theater experience we'd had over the summer. The girl next to me gushed about her experience working as a costuming intern for that same fucking repertory, and in particular their "amazing" production of Merchant. Everyone in the room duly oohed and aahed over how great the production sounded, and then the professor called on me.
I wanted to run out of the room.
I wanted to change majors and never have to look any of those people in the face again.
Instead, I talked about Merchant. I talked about every single antisemitic detail in the acting, direction, and yes, costuming, that I observed on that stage. I talked about exactly how I felt watching it, how violated my family had felt. I talked about how the same repertory had sensitively handled other -isms, and how it felt to know that they just didn't give enough of a shit about Jews to give us the same treatment. I watched every face in the room turn copy paper white as I talked, especially costuming girl.
It was the first time I had ever spoken my mind publicly about antisemitism and how it affected me, and I really let it all out. I was only supposed to talk for a minute. I talked for ten. And no one, not even the professor, made the slightest move to interrupt me.
When I was done, the class made a few weak expressions of how terrible it was that I'd "had that experience," costuming girl told me she was sorry, but she had never realized the show "could be taken that way," and the professor summed up my heartfelt speech of protest as a reminder of how theater can have a real emotional impact and how different people can experience the same performance differently.
Then he called on the next student.
