The New York Times, cronica la The Merchant of Venice, ianuarie 1999

THEATER REVIEW; From Serban, The Shylock Of Yesteryear, A Go-To Guy
Let Shylock be Shylock! is the unspoken motto of Andrei Serban's daringly unapologetic production of ''The Merchant of Venice.''
Shed no tears for the Jewish moneylender of Mr. Serban's design. Shylock may be cruelly maligned by the Christian hypocrites in Shakespeare's difficult play, with its anti-Semitic overtones, but in this version he has hardly been conceived as a figure to touch the heart. Though it has become customary to render Shylock with compassion, as in Peter Hall's 1989 Broadway production, in which Dustin Hoffman's dignified pillar of a Shylock endured the taunts and a shower of spittle from his enemies, Mr. Serban breaks with modern practice and gives us something more like the sinister Shylock of yore.
Thanks to the capable conjuring of the actor Will LeBow, Shylock is imagined in this visually striking modern-dress staging at the American Repertory Theater as a Venetian go-to guy who holds the beautiful people of the canals in as much contempt as they hold him. (The performance might appeal to the literary critic Harold Bloom, who in his new book on Shakespeare argues for just such a ''comic villain'' of a Shylock).
Just how spiteful a piece of work is this villain is revealed in Mr. LeBow's rendition of the famous ''Hath not a Jew eyes?'' speech. Routinely treated as a plea for understanding, it is instead delivered here as a caustic act of self-mockery, intended to patronize his bigoted audience, the Venetian dilettantes Solanio (Stephen Rowe) and Salerio (Jeremy Geidt).
Only when the embittered loan shark has them laughing along with him does his voice rise in sudden anguish and fury: ''And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?'' That this is a man who savors his singleminded pursuit of his pound of flesh is never in doubt; in the climactic courtroom scene, where he is called upon to claim the flesh owed him by the merchant Antonio (a shrewdly lugubrious Jonathan Epstein), he even draws a circle in red on the torso of his victim and theatrically traces it with a knife.
The sleek affability of Mr. LeBow's seductive portrayal imbues this Shylock with a visceral authority, a power to make things happen, which also makes him the most compelling feature of Mr. Serban's often absorbing production. But ''The Merchant of Venice'' is much more than the tale of a moneylender's humiliation; its more central concern is the romantic comedy of the wooing of Portia (Kristin Flanders) by Bassanio (Andrew Garman) and other sillier suitors. It's these lighter moments that trip up Mr. Serban, who seems much more in his element elucidating the cosmic complexities of ''Merchant'' than in realizing the gently comic ironies in the love story.
It may be that the hideous resolution of the Shylock subplot -- can an enlightened audience identify with a heroine who utters lines like ''Tarry, Jew'' or feel anything but squeamishness at Shylock's forced conversion? -- insinuates itself like an odor that can't be washed out. Still, Mr. Serban, who did such a fine job in Central Park last summer framing the humane qualities in Shakespeare's troublesome ''Cymbeline,'' has his actors take wide swings at the comic interludes, like overeager croquet players. The result is a tactlessness that undoes some of the production's finer points.
''Merchant'' is in part about the unraveling of riddles in language and law and the unmasking of people who are not what they seem. In this vein, the scenes encompassing the elaborate riddle that Portia poses for her suitors are bizarrely broad and consequently sophomoric; the young actors portraying princes from Morocco and Spain, for instance, are encouraged to play cartoon characters who throw off the play's rhythms, and Ms. Flanders and Portia's lady-in-waiting Nerissa (Nurit Monicelli), engage in an affected style of banter at an unnecessary remove from sincerity. While the play has Portia outwitting Shylock in court, Ms. Flanders never manages to challenge Mr. LeBow for primacy onstage.
Mr. Serban is a restless experimenter, so his Shakespearean ventures tend to be jampacked with ideas good and less good. One of his best notions here is the decadent and sexually ambiguous world of Antonio, the merchant of the title, who takes the disastrous loan from Shylock, with its peculiar terms, to finance the effort of his friend Bassanio to romance Portia.
The beauty of Venice and Belmont, as suggested by the Adriatic pastels in the lovely folding screens by Marielle Bancou and William Bonnell and lighting by Michael Chybowski, turns out to be a mirage. The scenic charm is as superficial as the slick, two-faced Venetian businessmen themselves, who make deals with the Jewish moneylender, only to revile him behind his back. (At a costume ball, they even resort to garish masks with exaggerated Semitic noses.) Dressing them all in natty European suits, it seems, is a reminder by Mr. Serban and his inventive costume designer, Catherine Zuber, that empty-headed bigotry has many contemporary disguises.
In this false paradise, Mr. Serban finds little to romanticize. Portia sermonizes grandly to Shylock about the quality of mercy, but she and the rest of Venice are complicit in a merciless dismemberment of Shylock's fortune, his faith, his very identity. It is the director's eloquent thesis, in fact, that Shylock and his Venetian tormentors are more alike than different; the vengeance envisioned by Shylock is symbolically carried out by his Christian adversaries. To drive home the point, perhaps unnecessarily, Mr. Serban creates a final dumb show in which Antonio -- who by Portia's verdict appropriates Shylock's wealth -- is locked in a dance with the masked Shylock. The borrower and the lender are now as one. Mr. Serban's uneven cast is an impediment. Several of the younger actors simply do not add their own pound of flesh to these mysterious characters, which gives the play an only partly lived-in quality. As he did with Liev Schreiber's vital Iachimo in ''Cymbeline,'' though, the director finds in Mr. LeBow a lead actor who helps us greatly in our navigation of the dark side. THE MERCHANT OF VENICE By William Shakespeare; directed by Andrei Serban; music composed by Elizabeth Swados; sets by Christine Jones; screen designs by Marielle Bancou and William Bonnell; costumes by Catherine Zuber; lighting by Michael Chybowski; sound by Christopher Walker; musical direction by Michael Friedman. Presented by the American Repertory Theater, Cambridge, Mass.