With Concord of Sweet Sounds
On Friday night, along with mollpeartree, lhn, prilicla, luckymarty, and ladysophis2k8, I had what is probably the closest to an authentically Shakespearean experience you can have without the plague and boy-actors. To wit: a rewrite of an already familiar play; in colloquial contemporary language; in iambic pentameter; with lots of in-jokes and references cultural, political, and sexual; and plenty of songs; in contemporary dress.
We saw Merchant on Venice, a rewrite by Shishir Kurup of the Shakespearean play of similar title, set on Venice Boulevard in L.A. among the (primarily) South Asian diaspora community. Antonio and Bassanio (Devendra and Jitendra) become Hindus, along with Portia, Nerissa, Gratiano, Launcelot, and one or two others. (Lorenzo stayed Catholic, though -- Mexican-American, in this version.)
And Shylock becomes Muslim (Sharukh). In these oh-so-enlightened times, one knows going into this kind of thing that one is in for an After-School Special ending instead of anything like Shakespeare's. (But for what it's worth, Kurup throws a really interesting head-fake toward a really good, and appropriately and ironically double-coded, Shakespearean ending that I think he could have pulled off in spades had he been willing to risk the controversy.) So having appropriately lowballed the predictable (and to be fair, entirely Modernist) disintegration at the end of Act IV (and kudos to Kurup for almost entirely truncating Act V instead of leaving it there like an appendix, as most directors of the source play do once they shift the play's emphasis from Antonio-Bassanio to Shylock-Antonio), I was totally unprepared for how truly excellent the entire rest of the play was.
There's just something about iambic pentameter that can really bring out the best in a playwright -- being forced to hit that rhythm, to hunt for the right word instead of the easy one -- and Kurup rose to the occasion, filling the dialogue with revamped Shakespeare (mostly from other plays), quotes from rock lyrics, Hindglish and south Asian and south L.A. slang, always working to provide call-backs and emblems in Shakespeare's style, and using each character's voice to identify them. There were bits that mollpeartree and I kept discovering on our way home (after a convivial round or two at the Encore), such as our realization that the word "mercy" did not (so far as we recalled) occur in the play, being replaced with "empathy," the very model of a modern virtue. Or that only Anish Jethmalani, as Sharukh, was acting (terrifically) in Bollywood style, while the other cast were acting (generally quite well) in more Western mode -- a very subtle way to convey outsider status for Shylock, and a thrill to watch. Or that the name of the Gratiano manque, Amitabh, conveys the character's obsession with old-school larger-than-life masculinity (Sinatra in this case), being also the name of Amitabh Bachchan, the Man's Man of 20th Century Bollywood.
mollpeartree and I also recognized both Bollywood tracks (with new lyrics) used in the play's dance numbers, which was gratifying.
Here's one last instance of how good the rewrite was: Even the casket scene was not entirely unbelievable in the context of Indian arranged marriages. Portia/Pushpa's father was a Bollywood director, you see, and he got the idea for her wedding arrangement lottery, a suitor's choice of three DVD cases ... from his own remake of Merchant of Venice. It was that kind of joyous riot of a play.
We saw Merchant on Venice, a rewrite by Shishir Kurup of the Shakespearean play of similar title, set on Venice Boulevard in L.A. among the (primarily) South Asian diaspora community. Antonio and Bassanio (Devendra and Jitendra) become Hindus, along with Portia, Nerissa, Gratiano, Launcelot, and one or two others. (Lorenzo stayed Catholic, though -- Mexican-American, in this version.)
And Shylock becomes Muslim (Sharukh). In these oh-so-enlightened times, one knows going into this kind of thing that one is in for an After-School Special ending instead of anything like Shakespeare's. (But for what it's worth, Kurup throws a really interesting head-fake toward a really good, and appropriately and ironically double-coded, Shakespearean ending that I think he could have pulled off in spades had he been willing to risk the controversy.) So having appropriately lowballed the predictable (and to be fair, entirely Modernist) disintegration at the end of Act IV (and kudos to Kurup for almost entirely truncating Act V instead of leaving it there like an appendix, as most directors of the source play do once they shift the play's emphasis from Antonio-Bassanio to Shylock-Antonio), I was totally unprepared for how truly excellent the entire rest of the play was.
There's just something about iambic pentameter that can really bring out the best in a playwright -- being forced to hit that rhythm, to hunt for the right word instead of the easy one -- and Kurup rose to the occasion, filling the dialogue with revamped Shakespeare (mostly from other plays), quotes from rock lyrics, Hindglish and south Asian and south L.A. slang, always working to provide call-backs and emblems in Shakespeare's style, and using each character's voice to identify them. There were bits that mollpeartree and I kept discovering on our way home (after a convivial round or two at the Encore), such as our realization that the word "mercy" did not (so far as we recalled) occur in the play, being replaced with "empathy," the very model of a modern virtue. Or that only Anish Jethmalani, as Sharukh, was acting (terrifically) in Bollywood style, while the other cast were acting (generally quite well) in more Western mode -- a very subtle way to convey outsider status for Shylock, and a thrill to watch. Or that the name of the Gratiano manque, Amitabh, conveys the character's obsession with old-school larger-than-life masculinity (Sinatra in this case), being also the name of Amitabh Bachchan, the Man's Man of 20th Century Bollywood.
mollpeartree and I also recognized both Bollywood tracks (with new lyrics) used in the play's dance numbers, which was gratifying.
Here's one last instance of how good the rewrite was: Even the casket scene was not entirely unbelievable in the context of Indian arranged marriages. Portia/Pushpa's father was a Bollywood director, you see, and he got the idea for her wedding arrangement lottery, a suitor's choice of three DVD cases ... from his own remake of Merchant of Venice. It was that kind of joyous riot of a play.