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Let me preempt the question that I have heard more than any other in relation to this production: why The Merchant of Venice?  The play itself is over 400 years old—an unusual body of material for a student theater group defined by its commitment to creating contemporary, socially-relevant theater.  It is also a controversial play.  With a plot overshadowed by the figure of Shylock, a religious minority built upon offensive Elizabethan stereotypes, the play has faltered to find a comfortable place in the Shakespeare canon.

STAMP’s production rests on the affirmation that, though filled with anti-Semitic language, The Merchant of Venice is not an anti-Semitic play.  Our production emphasizes the questionable behavior of characters across the board, from the ignorantly intolerant Christians to the defiantly disempowered Shylock, and puts pressure on the moments when characters’ actions, reactions, and the outcome could have been radically different.  Like many other great Shakespearean works, we hope the show will summon more questions than answers.  We hope that it will make you more cognizant about the importance of belief—religious or secular—as a source of identity and motivation in your own life and in the lives of others around you.

The Merchant of Venice never fails to surprise me by how quickly the central conflict escalates from a personal feud to a matter of life and death.   But I believe that the greatest religious conflicts in the world can be put on a road to recovery through tolerance and openness on the most personal level.  The path to peace begins in the coffee shop, at the bus stop, at the talk-back discussion following this evening’s performance, in your dorm.  It begins with you.

Heidi Thorsen
Producer

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What I especially love about this project is its uniqueness in relation to other STAMP shows. Choosing a Shakespeare play pushes into the foreground underlying questions of activist theater--questions that would most likely remain hidden were we producing a work more obviously political. Of these lurking questions, the one I am most interested in is: How can theater (and, in particular, an "outdated" work like Merchant) be activist?

Most STAMP shows direct awareness towards certain issues (i.e. mental health on campus, the death penalty in the U.S.) by transferring information to audiences while simultaneously affecting their emotions enough to change their future choices. In contrast, our show does not advocate any course of action. Rather, Merchant tells a tragic story of two different world-views existing in the same space. Our task as theater artists (and your task as audience members) is to explore the ways this story can make us think in new ways about how we live in a multi-faith place like Stanford.

The actors and I have spent the last few weeks exploring contemporary issues and events in our own lives in order to breathe modern motivations into Shakespeare's 400-year-old words. And you, the audience, have the chance to experience a similar experiment. What moments in our production make sense? What feels weird? And what does that tell you about our world today? In my mind, your answers to these questions constitute the power and purpose of modern dress Shakespeare.

Morielle Stroethoff
Director