Lighting Design by Aaron Curry / Media Design by Jesse Easdon Set Design by Tucker Goodman / Costume Design by Jessi Rose Music and Sound Design by Michael Zapruder Stage Manager Skyler Taten Assistant Stage Managers Brittney Dolan and Walter Reyes Assistant Director Aly Redland
The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
Directed by Adam L. Sussman
Produced by UT Department of Theatre & Dance
Nov 14 - Dec 2nd 2018
Set
“The best production of a Shakespeare play that I have ever seen.”
"...was as moving an experience as I have ever had in theater"
-Paul Woodruff, Author of The Necessity of Theater
The Merchant of Venice is one of the only works in the canon that features a Jewish character. There are many problematic aspects of this character to be sure, but Merchant also comments powerfully on how anti-Semitism operates in society. More broadly, through multiple characters the play explores what it means to be marginalized from power and what happens when marginalized individuals use the tools of oppressive systems to gain power.
As for Shylock, director Anne Bogart writing on the uses of stereotypes in art notes that, “Stereotype is a container for memory. If these culturally transmuted containers are entered, heated up and awakened, perhaps we might, in the heat of interaction, re-access the original messages, meanings and histories they embody.” That is what I’ve tried to do with this production, to allow us to see one of Shakespeare’s most iconic and troubling characters anew, so that we may reassess and remake a painful literary figure whose shadow extends through history to the present alarming climate of rising white nationalism.