Brush Up Your Shakespeare! - 06/19/2011

The Merchant of Venice: A Reading of Key Scenes by Saratoga Shakespeare Actors, with Discussion led by Jay Rogoff

Saratoga Springs Public Library and Saratoga Shakespeare Company are partnering to present Brush Up Your Shakespeare, a program that will prepare the community for Saratoga Shakespeare Company’s annual summer production. Saratoga Shakespeare actors will read key scenes from The Merchant of Venice, this year’s featured summer production. President of the Saratoga Shakespeare Company’s Board, Jay Rogoff, will lead an audience discussion on this strange, yet romantic comedy. While The Merchant of Venice concerns Bassanio’s pursuit of wealthy and beautiful Portia, it also presents the audience with many tensions and oppositions. Including conflicts between money and love, justice and mercy, parents and children, friends and spouses, and most famously the religious conflict between the values of Christian Venice and those of the Jews and other outsiders who live in the city. The tensions, timely around 1597 when Shakespeare wrote the play, have never disappeared, and Merchant takes on a special urgency today, when immigrants to America find themselves denied equal treatment, and people our society identifies as “others” suffer stereotyping and discrimination. Merchant also ponders the relevant question of whether love can triumph and transform members of a society where money is held as the greatest good. Brush Up Your Shakespeare will be held at 7:00 p.m. Monday, June 20 at the Saratoga Springs Public Library in the H. Dutcher Community Room.