Thursday, November 28th Como'spresents L-jittniAj tityk mayheifilotatoov, esweetimiteztoev, ovettiolety, Naiad cwarifieivy Natice:; pany,hatAie, Welsh actor/playwright shines in his own theatrical variations on a Shakespearean theme. Entertainment Writer ewish theater-goers are about as fond of William Shakespeare's play The Merchant of Venice as Jewish music-lovers are of the operas of Richard Wagner. However, it would be a shame if distaste for what many con- sider to be Shakespeare's only anti-Semitic play were to keep audiences away from Gareth Armstrong's one-man show Shylock, playing through Nov. 24 in the Aaron DeRoy Theatre in the Jewish Community Center in West Bloomfield. The first production of the Jewish Ensemble Theatre's Guest Artist Series, this dramatic riff on the themes of prejudice, persecution and life on the wicked stage is wickedly entertaining. And Armstrong is likely the most talented classical actor to appear in metro Detroit in several seasons. The Welsh actor, a veteran of the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, was driven to investigate the origins of the Merchant and its Jewish villain when he was chosen for the role of Shylock at England's Salisbury Playhouse. He found the outlines of the plot in a 14th-century Italian fairy-tale, Il Pecorone (The Simpleton). In addition to lifting the outline of his plot, Shakespeare lifted his stock comic villain — the avaricious Jew — from centuries of popular drama. To turn his research into a unified theater piece, Armstrong chose as his mouthpiece a minor but crucial char- acter in Shakespeare's Merchant — Shylock's friend, "a wealthy Hebrew" named Tubal. "OK, it's not a very big part. In fact, it's only one scene. Well, half a scene really — he comes in half way through someone else's scene," Tubal confides to the audience. "Eight lines. That's Tubal's contri- bution. ... One scene — but it's a great scene." In the tradition of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, playwright Tom Stoppard's variations on Shakespeare's Hamlet, Shylock's main character steps outside the frame- work of the play and back inside at will. One moment, Tubal is a one-man Greek chorus, retelling Merchant's plot as the working-out of Shylock's inevitable fate. Then, suddenly, he is an actor portraying Shylock; then he is Shylock; then he becomes a mod- ern historian, listing the atrocities perpetrated on the Jews in the name of Christianity. Wigs, books and other small props extracted from a steamer truck are the only visual aids in this virtuoso performance, which Armstrong has taken around the world since its 1999 debut. The viewer does not need an inti- mate knowledge of Shakespeare's play to understand what's going on. And when the narrative becomes its most bleak, Tubal makes a rapid-fire change to the self-deprecating comic, with more than a tinge of Jewish humor. Armstrong also tackles the absur- dist question of what happens to a fictional character when the curtain goes down. Although there's no pretense that the action on the stage is anything but a theatrical fabrication, the view- er reacts to the Jewish moneylender as if he were a suffering human being, not just a stock character. That, Armstrong points out, is the genius of Shakespeare. But, to take the raw material of what is arguably Shakespeare's most problematic play, to pare it down to its origins and rebuild it in minimal- ist fashion — and still leave the audi- ence aching for a happy ending for Shylock, after the curtain goes down — that's the genius of Armstrong. CI Shylock, written and performed by Gareth Armstrong, runs 7:30 p.m. Wednesdays and Thursdays, 8 p.m. Saturdays and 2 p.m. Sundays through Nov. 24 at the Aaron DeRoy Theatre in the Jewish Community Center in West Bloomfield. $20-$30 with senior and student discounts. (248) 788-2900. 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