Anatomy of a Stereotype

F. Murray Abraham is devoting a season to exploring the 'stage Jew'

By Lori Ann Laster

Long before he entered into rehearsals, F. Murray Abraham had already committed to tackling two infamous Jewish stage characters, Barabas in Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta and Shylock in William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice—at the same time.
He is performing the roles in rotating repertory over the course of two months this winter at the Duke on 42nd Street in Manhattan under the auspices of Theatre for a New Audience. Abraham, who has an Academy Award, a Golden Globe and credits in more than 80 films and 90 plays under his belt, wanted to take on yet another well-known Jewish role—
Fagin in a new adaptation of Oliver Twist, which is the third play in TFANA's uniquely focused season.

Unfortunately, a scheduling conflict threw a wrench into the ambitions of the 67-year-old actor, whose passion for theatre seems as outsized as his large-scale persona [see sidebar]. Nevertheless, the prospect of Abraham playing a double bill of Barabas and Shylock—the plays run through March 11—promises to provoke fresh examinations of the characters' place in history. "This is the project of my life!" Abraham declares. "I expect it will be a sensation in all aspects of that word. I think this project may remind producers who are otherwise cowardly how exciting it can be to to produce something that's dangerous. Audiences may get up and scream—which is good for business. Theatre for a New Audience's season is so courageous—it's so what the theatre should mean, and usually doesn't."

TFANA, a 27-year-old company dedicated to breathing new life into the classics, selects a season of plays each year based on a theme. This year's theme, "An Exploration of the Other," brings together three canonical works that are notorious for their anti-Semitic characterizations of the Jew: The Jew of Malta is directed by David Herskovits; Merchant, written just seven years later, is directed by Darko Tresnjak; and Dickens's often-adulterated classic Oliver Twist has been adapted and will be directed by Britisher Neil Bartlett. TFANA artistic director Jeffrey Horowitz pulled the collaboration together after Abraham committed to taking on lead roles two-and-a-half years ago. Abraham has been involved in choosing the directors, in casting and in script editing in collaboration with critic/translator Michael Feingold and Shakespearean scholar James Shapiro. A Fox Foundation Resident Actor Fellowship, administered by Theatre Communications Group, provided funds for some of Abraham's advance preparation for the roles.

After the New York engagement of the first two plays, Abraham and his 13 fellow cast members are slated to travel to England to present Merchant in the Royal Shakespeare Company's mammoth Complete Works Festival, in which more than 17 international companies—from Africa, India, China and across mainland Europe—are participating over the course of a year. Meanwhile, Bartlett's staging of his Oliver Twist adaptation runs March 29-April 15 at John Jay College's Gerald W. Lynch Theater in New York, between engagements at Massachusetts's American Repertory Theatre Feb. 17-March 24 and California's Berkeley Repertory Theatre May 11-June 24 (the two companies are co-producing the Dickens work with TFANA).

By all accounts, especially Abraham's and Horowitz's, a season devoted to politically incorrect visions of "the Jew" is risky, challenging and exciting. Fagin, Shylock and Barabas embody some of the worst of Jewish stereotypes, negative characteristics that have become deeply embedded in contemporary culture. "I studied to be an actor in London and had a roommate from Oxford," Horowitz recalls, explaining some of his own personal encounters with anti-Semitic prejudice. "One night he asked me if he could touch my head. He said, 'You don't have horns.' He'd always been told that Jews had horns, and he wondered if there was something in the physiognomy of my skull."

The uncomfortable fact that archaic anti-Semitic attitudes are still part of the culture is one of the many driving forces that motivated both Abraham and Horowitz to commit to a season examining that history and asking what perspectives the plays offer on our modern-day society. "Stereotypes continue to exist," says Horowitz, and "these three plays can throw a sharp illuminating light on our world and how we live—and force others to live."

Certainly the plays themselves, on a superficial level, give actors the chance to confront the clear and present danger of Jewish stereotypes. Marlowe elaborates on a centuries-old anti-Semitic stereotype in Jew of Malta: Flamboyantly evil and deceitful, Barabas is a vicious murderer; the only thing he cares about is money. Simply because of his ethnic background, he is abused badly: The Maltese governor Ferneze, for instance, sees nothing wrong with forcing a Jew like Barabas to forfeit half his wealth to help pay a required tribute to the Ottoman empire. Barabas initially refuses to relinquish his funds, so Ferneze confiscates all his wealth and property. The unmerciful and two-faced Barabas schemes to get back his beloved gold. He takes no prisoners. Later, when Barabas's daughter Abigail finds out her father is responsible for the death of the young man she loves, she defects to a nunnery and adopts Christianity. Aghast, Barabas kills his daughter by poisoning the whole convent.

Shakespeare assumes a similar tack in his stage portrayal of Jewishness. What Marlowe's Barabas is to the people of Malta, Shakespeare's Shylock is to the people of Venice—both Jews are considered second-class citizens. A moneylender, Shylock is shunned and literally spat upon by his Christian neighbors, including the merchant Antonio. When the latter, in desperation, pleads for Shylock to give him a loan, Shylock tries to exact sweet revenge against the younger man—he devises a plot in retaliation against the abuse he and his fellow Jews have suffered under the Christians. The perceived wrongs to his people culminate in Merchant when Shylock's daughter Jessica steals from him, and, like Abigail in Jew of Malta, abandons her Jewish heritage and converts to the Christian faith.

Historians have speculated about whether or not Merchant (circa 1596) was written in direct response to Jew of Malta (circa 1589). Not only do Shylock and Barabas lose the security of their wealth, they also lose the loyalty of their daughters, who both commit the ultimate betrayal by converting to Christianity. A major divergence here, however, is that while Shylock grieves for the loss of Jessica, Barabas fiendishly plots the murder of Abigail. Shylock's humanity and complexity have often been read as Shakespeare's reaction to the archetypal savagery of Barabas.

In Oliver Twist, Dickens's Fagin, too, has inherited the vestiges of stage conventions of the evil Jew, which date back to medieval times. Though often retold as a feel-good children's story (the most notable example being Lionel Bart's 1963 musical Oliver!), the novel has quite a bit of its own anti-Semitic baggage. Yet another miserly Jew, Fagin is the leader, savior and corrupter of orphaned street urchins in 18th-century London. His protégé, the Artful Dodger, brings to their pickpocket fold a young orphan, Oliver, who has run away from a life of servitude. In Bartlett's faithful adaptation of Dickens's tale, Fagin has mastered the intricacies of surviving in a cutthroat world by exploiting those who are even more destitute than he.

According to medieval thinking, "the Jew" was deemed the epitome of evil and regarded as a literal incarnation of the devil. Linked to Judas, the betrayer of the New Testament, Jews were held accountable for the perceived crimes of their biblical forefathers and ultimately held responsible for the crucifixion of Christ. Jewish rituals, such as circumcision and the observance of Passover, were misconstrued as diabolically subversive to the Church. Consequently, the Jew was accused of a range of vile acts, including poisoning wells, committing ritual murder and eating Christian babies, all of which were refracted back to the depiction of Jews on stage. Banned by society from taking up the majority of reputable jobs and professional trades as well as from owning property, many Jews found refuge in the profession of usury. To the Christian populace, moneylending at any interest was considered to be a malicious sin, and this belief added the stigma of "money-grubbing" to the cultural myth. The stage Jew—with his bottle-shaped nose and shock of red hair (signifying a connection to the devil)—became the scapegoat for the source of evil in medieval pageants and plays.

Ironically, Merchant and Jew of Malta were written at a time when Jews had been banished from England for 300 years. Although several communities of Jews lived there in secret, there is no evidence that Shakespeare or Marlowe ever knew any Jews. Since the dramatists did not work from living models, they most likely revitalized the devil-like figure they knew from medieval literature. It wasn't until 1656 that Oliver Cromwell readmitted Jews to England, and until 1753 that the Jewish Naturalization Act was passed, enabling Jews to become naturalized British subjects. Still, the presence of Fagin in Oliver Twist demonstrates that, even in 1838, the cultural myth of the Jew was still vibrant in the fabric of English society.

Merchant, Jew of Malta and Oliver Twist utilize stereotypes and tackle offensive material in very different ways. As Horowitz sees it, "Marlowe's play is called a tragedy and becomes a comedy, while Shakespeare's play is called a comedy and becomes a tragedy."

When I attended rehearsals in New York, it was quite apparent that Abraham intends not only to pull out all the acting stops but also to exploit most people's frequent assumption, based on his prominent facial features and surname, that the actor is of Jewish derivation. (In fact, he is not a Jew; he is of Syrian/Italian Christian heritage.) When the actor Saxon Palmer, playing the sinister pimp Pilia-Borza, threatens to blackmail Barabas in Jew of Malta, Palmer literally strokes Abraham's well-endowed nose. Pilia-Borza's contempt is palpable when he demands, "Jew, I must ha' more gold." Barabas throws this contempt right back, as he lets out an incensed sneer. Barabas is trapped: He is responsible for the murder of two noble young men and the poisoning of a whole convent of nuns, so if his nefarious deeds are revealed, he will surely meet his demise.

Growing pallid as he comes to grips with a dilemma that offers no escape, Abraham reluctantly hands over a chest of precious gold to Palmer. In the distance, the discordant fluttering of a harp can be heard, accenting the inner anguish that plays across Abraham's face. In triumph, Palmer skips gleefully off, leaving behind a defeated Barabas. He is besieged with a grief that seems comparable to that of losing a child: "Was ever Jew tormented as I am?" Barabas exclaims.

In all of the three plays that comprise TFANA's season, Jewish characters are ostracized not because of who they are but because of what they stand for. Jews are unassimilated foreigners. Their Jewishness—their exoticized moral and spiritual belief system—sets them in direct opposition to the normative Christian society. Jews are relegated to the status of "the other," despised and then victimized by xenophobic attitudes of intolerant societies. "They are plays about a Christian society under stress, undergoing change, and the Jew becomes the lightning rod for the anxiety about that change," says Horowitz.

And with the powerful and charismatic Abraham at the eye of the dramatic storm, the characters of Barabas and Shylock are likely to become the twin poles against which theatregoing audiences can trace the disturbing trajectory of the stage Jew in history. While the actor relishes portraying the indiscriminate evil of Marlowe's Barabas, bearing, as it seems to, a close lineage to the figure of the medieval Jew, Abraham hopes to show Shylock as an intrinsically flawed man, a Jew who is not seeking malicious revenge but a demented form of justice. Abraham states, "I would like to present a man that everyone can identify with and understand and feel sympathy for in their own way." Playing Barabas and Shylock, Abraham acknowledges the discrete verbal echoes between the two plays. "What I would like to happen when people see both plays is to see the saturation and the possibility for an experience that begins with Barabas and grows into Shylock."

Abraham has played numerous Jewish characters in his long and prestigious career, including Alchonon in the Broadway production of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Teibele and Her Demon, Roy Cohn in Tony Kushner's Angels in America, late in its Broadway run, and Arnold Rothstein in the 1991 film Mobsters. In preparing to embody the Jewish "other" on stage this time around, Abraham says, "I am looking for a universal character, a universal man who reflects the pain that every outsider has ever experienced."

While TFANA's season would have been provocative even before the recent escalation of violence in the Middle East, it's especially so now. With the ongoing bloodshed in that region, incendiary anti-Semitic comments coming out of the mouths of Hollywood celebrities and controversy over work that offers alternative points of view (e.g., the pro-Palestine sentiments of My Name Is Rachel Corrie), TFANA's season is likely to provoke some heated responses. Abraham remembers how, in a recent symposium about the three plays held in Manhattan, one man leapt up shouting, "This play should never be done!" The man was referring to Merchant of Venice. When Abraham asked where the book-burning would stop, the man "became incomprehensible in his rage," the actor recalls, and had to be escorted out. At the same event, a woman broke down in tears when speaking about Jessica's betrayal of her father Shylock by running "away with a goy."

This is not the first time these three plays have courted impassioned pro-Jewish sentiments, or even cultivated miscreant anti-Jewish elements. Merchant and Jew of Malta were both appropriated by the Nazi party to reinforce anti-Semitic stereotypes during World War II, and have been repeatedly censored since. In 1949 a case was brought before the Supreme Court of Kings County, N.Y., demanding that both Oliver Twist and Merchant of Venice be banned in schools, libraries and classrooms. As recently as 2001, the Stratford Festival of Canada was forced to alter its production of Merchant of Venice due to complaints made by a Muslim-Canadian lobby group.

In the TFANA productions, the directors, designers and actors are not going to shy away from the difficult qualities or the darkness inherent in the plays. Tresnjak and his designers are reinterpreting Merchant of Venice through the prism of a modern-day world, where stock-market quotes, plasma televisions and cell phones are ubiquitous in a stylized version of contemporary Venice. Though Herskovits and his Jew of Malta designers are going to generally adhere to period costumes and scenery, they hope to push and exaggerate the savage farcical elements of Marlowe's play, while connecting the Jacobean horrors in the text to the contemporary world through a modern-tinged sound design. Both directors are adamant about trimming the text but not censoring the nasty anti-Semitic underbelly. Says Tresnjak, "It's important to let the play live in the world without censorship…because if you don't, you kill history." Herskovits agrees: "If you are doing this play and you don't want to deal with the offensive nature of it, then you are wasting your time."

The danger that these plays may arouse intense feelings is precisely what proves their timeliness and pertinence, says Abraham, adding that he sees an analogous connection between how the Jewish foreigners are treated in Malta or Venice and how immigrants are treated in the United States: "They're allowed to work, they pay taxes, but they can't vote. And they can be deported in a second. That's exactly the situation 450 years ago," the actor says.

Abraham recognizes that the antipathy around the world that is responsible for sparking devastating violence, including the genocide in Rwanda and the civil war in Sri Lanka, is a modern symptom of this fear of "the other."

Having emotionally and artistically invested themselves in this project, Abraham, Horowitz and the entire artistic team at TFANA anxiously await the response of audiences, because they understand that this season was not designed to pacify a somnambulant public. "I don't think you are a theatre unless you are taking risks and challenging the status quo," allows Horowitz. Abraham agrees: "This is one of the most exciting things that has ever happened to me in the theatre in my life. And I'm approaching 70—I've been around."

Lori Ann Laster is a freelance dramaturg and arts writer based in New York City. She is currently the program director at Urban Stages.

From the Bosom of Abraham

F. Murray Abraham took time out of December rehearsals to answer some questions about the TFANA season.

LORI ANN LASTER: How did you get involved with this season at Theatre for a New Audience?
F. MURRAY ABRAHAM: Jeffrey Horowitz called and said, "I want to do these plays. What do you think?" I said, "That's fantastic." I was like a kid again—that's how excited I was.

Due to the provocative nature of these plays, did you have any reservations about committing to the season?
I had no reservations about this at all. People picketing, yelling from the audience—100 years ago they did that in the theatre. There was a back and forth. I believe that's what theatre means, or should.

Do you think anyone will judge your performances differently because you aren't Jewish yourself?
When people ask the question, "How are you going to play a Jew?" what kind of Jew do they expect? One like they are—or one like they wish they were? A reformed, a conservative, a Lubavitcher from Brooklyn? An Israeli Jew is very different from an Italian or French or British Jew. Many would argue that the Jew they would rather be identified with is Barabas, rather than Shylock—believe me, you'd better not cross Barabas. This is much more complex than people care to admit, because it speaks to a diversity that argues against the monolith that most religions wish were the reality.

The question, "What is a Jew?" is an ancient argument that Jews continue to have even now. My task is not to find the answer to that Talmudic conundrum—we'll let men much smarter than I am decide that. My task is to make Shylock a human being, a man whom you know at the end of the play, a man you carry with you when you leave the theatre.

These characters have frequently been labeled as anti-Semitic stereotypes. Are you consciously trying to combat those stereotypes at all?
I'm trying to portray the stereotypes as vividly and flamboyantly and outrageously as possible—to show people how ridiculous they are. A lot of times, no matter how flamboyant you are, some people actually believe that crap—that Jews have horns. It sounds amazing, it sounds ridiculous, but it's true. And the stereotypes extend to the Turks and Arabs as well, who appear in these plays. Christians come in for a lashing as well.

Obviously, there is always trouble in the Middle East, but the recent blowups on the Lebanon/Israel border have caused a rise in the vocalization of anti-Semitism. Has that affected your approach to the characters?
For me, it heightens the intensity of our performance. We have been more aware of the responsibility we're taking on. How it's going to land, nobody knows. One of the most brilliant things about Jew of Malta, as opposed to Merchant of Venice, is that very few people actually know it. I think these current events are going to absolutely affect the production, not only from our point of view but also from the audience's point of view. They bring that history, that baggage, with them whether they want to or not. How we handle our idea of their perception determines, I suppose, what we're made of. Are we going to have the courage to present this work as something that displays some of the worst aspects of human nature? That's what this is about.

Why do you think it is important to produce these plays as written, rather than politically correct versions?
If you're going to do the play, do the fucking play! You can cut some lines, but not the meaning. If the line "I hate him for he is a Christian" is cut, as it was in the film that [Al] Pacino did, how do you account for the meaning of the scene? That's a very serious line. And it comes within the same speech in which Shylock says, in effect, "He hates me because I'm Jewish." In other words, they're two sides of the same coin. The only way to honestly present the play is to do it in such a way that it is not pandering to what you think the populace wants, or to what a certain situation in the Middle East, or in South Africa, or here in America on our border with Mexico, demands. We're reminded that what we're going through now is not new, not original. It's an ancient thing.

As an actor, what are some of the rewards in tackling these plays in repertory?
Tomorrow we will read through, for the first time, Merchant of Venice, after having rehearsed for two weeks with Marlowe's Jew of Malta. The value is—we are not afraid of Shakespeare! American actors generally have a fear of Shakespeare. But you can't play reverence. You've got to kick him in the ass! You've got to test him—that's what he wants, because no matter what you do to Shakespeare, he can take it. He wants the best from you! You know the kind of times he was living in—there were severed heads of Catholics on posts! The point is, you're talking about life and death every day, and this amazing literature came out of that period. So if you approach Shakespeare with reverence, you're missing the best, baby. We're not going to allow Merchant to be worshipful, concerned about the last 450 years it's been done. And I think in performance that's going to pay off.