The Merchant of Venice: John Douglas Thompson and Arin Arbus in conversation with Ayanna Thompson (Part II of IV): Merchant in Rehearsal

AYANNA THOMPSON is a Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University and the Director of the Arizona Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies (ACMRS). Bio continues at interview end.

This interview was originally published in Theatre for a New Audience's 360 Viewfinder: The Merchant of Venice. Copyright 2022 by Theatre for a New Audience, all rights reserved.

Midway through rehearsals for Theatre for a New Audience (TFANA)'s 2022 production of The Merchant of Venice, Ayanna Thompson of TFANA's Council of Scholars (and a consulting scholar on the production) spoke with director Arin Arbus and actor John Douglas Thompson.

AYANNA THOMPSON Arin, I wonder, now that the production is up on its feet, what have you learned through hearing the dialogue being spoken?

ARIN ARBUS God, I don't know yet, to be honest with you. I'm feeling very affected by Act Five and the ending of the play, which is - even today in staging it, I'm shocked by it, it just is horrendous. And the last line, which is a vagina joke, I can't even believe that it's there.

I knew that that's what it was, and I knew it was this weird, uncomfortable joke. But then, we staged it and I actually don't know what to do. I was so kind of offended by it, that I thought, "Maybe I have to tell Haynes [Thigpen], who's playing Gratiano, maybe I've gotta tell him not to be so awful." But he's doing the text! I'm not being very articulate because I haven't wrapped my brain around the experience of the play yet.

AYANNA THOMPSON I do think in the 21st century, it's hard to have a production that ends comedically. Because the play does shut so many people out, it does reinforce a bizarre superstructure that we may be thinking about deconstructing in our world now. Maybe showing that mirror of horror up in the production will open up dialogues for the audience about potential changes that we'd want to make in the world we live in.

ARIN ARBUS That would be amazing. I think that's what Shakespeare's intention was.

AYANNA THOMPSON John, has anything surprised you in the language, now that you are in the staging phase?

JOHN DOUGLAS THOMPSON I guess the same thing that always surprises, or that I become aware of, in this stage of a production, is the potency of the language. It feels real. And the way that people express themselves, albeit in a nasty way sometimes. But what sticks out to me is the contradictions of the characters: they say one thing and they do another, or they profess that they are one thing, but they actually are the opposite of that. So, what really strikes me is the humanity that I think is in the language, because I think people are that way.

I remember having discussions with Arin that this is not a play that is happening in outer space, or with another species. This is us, which is ugly. And then there's also beautiful aspects of the play, which is also us. So, as I get to this stage of the game, I give all credit to Shakespeare. Wow, how well he understood people. Their intentions, their motivations. So, what surprises me is how real it can become with a group of people when they're working on it. The language has potency, it really has urgency, and complications, and cost.

AYANNA THOMPSON I think this play has potentially more direct language than some other of Shakespeare plays. Maybe it's related to what you were just saying, that people say one thing and do the exact opposite. And so, in fact, you need what they're saying to be pretty clear for the divide between the spoken word and the action to resonate with the audience. It doesn't have any of that weird circumambient language of Macbeth or even King Lear, where it's knotty, knotty, and hard to say. That's not what this play does, right?

JOHN DOUGLAS THOMPSON No. Every character is extremely contradictory which, as an actor, becomes really interesting to play. Because oftentimes, as an actor, it's like "Oh, I need to even this out. If I say this is the scene, I need to be that, or follow through with that." Whereas people, normal people, everyday people, say one thing and mean another, can be mean to someone, and then kind to the next person they meet... and that's just who we are.

So, as I was watching the play today, I was like, "Oh, these are just people." These are just people living their life as they think it should be and going through their life with a certain amount of intention; whether it hurts another person or not is not their concern. It's really about how can I move forward in my life?

AYANNA THOMPSON I think that's absolutely right. I also think the casual racism and anti-Semitism that is spoken in the play is very real in our life now. You hear snatches of conversation on street corners and you’re like, “I can’t believe they’re actually saying that.” And you know that they’re not horrible, evil people.

JOHN DOUGLAS THOMPSON Yeah. There was a story—did you see it on CNN, Arin? I think it happened in Brooklyn, where this woman spat on this 8-year-old Jewish child. And then said a bunch of racial epithets to this kid. That just happened like two days ago. And we talk about that in the play, which is 400 years old. So, there’s a sameness to the world that we live in that is also the world that we’re playing out in Merchant of Venice.

AYANNA THOMPSON And the people who know that woman who spat on the child probably think that she’s nice and normal in the rest of her life.

JOHN DOUGLAS THOMPSON She probably has a child herself, that she loves to death and is gonna go home and cook dinner, and then dress him up for school, and go to school... you know, all those things that good people do. But they’re also capable of very, very bad things. And it’s not just one person. As I watched the play, I was like, “Oh, we’re all guilty of the same stuff.”

AYANNA THOMPSON is the author of Blackface (Bloomsbury, 2021), Shakespeare in the Theatre: Peter Sellars (Arden Bloomsbury, 2018), Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose: A Student-Centred Approach, co-authored with Laura Turchi (Arden Bloomsbury, 2016), Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America (Oxford University Press, 2011) and Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage (Routledge, 2008). She wrote the new introduction for the revised Arden3 Othello (Arden, 2016) and is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Weyward Macbeth: Intersections of Race and Performance (Palgrave, 2010), and Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance (Routledge, 2006). She is currently collaborating with Curtis Perry on the Arden4 edition of Titus Andronicus.

In 2020, Thompson became a Shakespeare Scholar in Residence at The Public Theatre in New York. In 2021, she joined the boards of the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the National Parks Arts Foundation, and Play On Shakespeare. Previously, she served as the President of the Shakespeare Association of America, one of Phi Beta Kappa's Visiting Scholars, a member of the Board of Directors for the Association of Marshall Scholars, and a member of the Woolly Mammoth Theatre board.