The Merchant of Venice

Shakespeare’s perennially contested play about corrosive bigotry and blinding vengeance is poised squarely at the radioactive intersection of race, class, and religion in Arin Arbus’s production. John Douglas Thompson stars as the ill-used, vindictive money-lender Shylock in his fifth classical collaboration with Arbus. The show’s uniquely diverse company and creative team evoke a deeply stratified Venice suffused with racism, misogyny, classism, and homophobia, its connections to our own grievously fractured world vivid, stark and startling.