Theater Review - All that glitters: Valhalla and The Merchant of Venice

Can you put a monetary value on life and love? And if so, should you put them on your credit or debit card? Two comedies currently running at different theaters try to measure the differences between intangible value and material price.

Georgia Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice contains multiple plot threads that pit earthly goods against higher concerns such as life and love. Director Sabin Epstein polishes the shining virtues and darker facets of one of Shakespeare’s most problematic plays. Meanwhile, at Essential Theatre, Paul Rudnick’s Valhalla tracks the life of two men – a young, small-town Texan and “Mad” King Ludwig II of Bavaria – and their lifelong quests to find perfect beauty in a plain, uninspiring world.

Venice and Valhalla, both comedies lined with tragedy, present vastly different perspectives on physical treasures vs. spiritual riches, yet function like opposite sides of the same gleaming coin.

The Merchant of Venice’s title character, Antonio (Allen O’Reilly), borrows money from Jewish Shylock (Chris Kayser) so his penniless pal Bassanio (Joe Knezevich) can woo the sparkling heiress Portia (Park Krausen). From that premise, at least four of the play’s plots hinge on misperceptions of inherent value. Suitors like Bassanio can only win Portia’s hand if they solve a riddle involving three boxes – one gold, one silver and one lead. The play famously asserts “All that glisters is not gold,” underscoring its theme that money and looks aren’t everything.

In the play’s most notorious tale, Shylock demands Antonio forfeit a pound of his flesh if he can’t make good on the debt. Shylock’s miserly greed and resentment of Venice’s Christians like Antonio have made him a bitter, twisted personality. When his daughter Jessica (Susannah Miller) elopes with a Christian, and worse, steals his treasure, Shylock cries, “I would my daughter dead at my foot, with the jewels in her ear!”

Kayser’s engrossing performance endows Shylock with a remarkable amount of pathos. As written, Shylock lives up to 16th-century prejudices against Jews, but Epstein’s production clearly implies that Venetian anti-Semitism against such a “devil” has warped his personality. Shylock delivers the famed “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” line while face-to-face with transparently hateful Christians (Brad Sherrill and Daniel May). Intriguingly, May’s and Sherrill’s roles frequently handle silver flasks or pocket watches, as if their status symbols define the Venetian ruling class.

Epstein and his actors present Venice with such sharp focus that they manage to invest meaning in even the courtly fripperies. The play concludes with a romantic game about misplaced rings that suggests sometimes a pretty object can represent something greater, and being reckless with such a symbol can put an actual relationship at risk.

Valhalla focuses even more directly on beauty as its own reward, whether in the form of an architectural wonder, an attractive body or a pink chenille bedspread. The relentlessly quippy playwright of such hits as I Hate Hamlet and Jeffrey, Rudnick reveals deeper ambitions in Valhalla. The play examines the fascination of many gay men with aesthetic beauty, a lifelong obsession for both Bavaria’s Ludwig (Topher Payne) in the 19th century and Texas’ James Avery (Matt Felten) in the 1930s and ’40s. Both have consuming needs for beauty – in people and objects – even as children. In his first scene, James shoplifts a crystal swan as a kleptomaniacal 10-year-old, saying only, “I needed it.”

Payne offers a droll and sympathetic portrait of Ludwig, a royal sissy who moons over Wagnerian opera, recoils at ugly servants and remains oblivious to political realities. The Ludwig track offers hilarious, Woody Allen-esque farce, and Jane Kroessing’s costumes convey Ludwig’s world on a shoestring budget. The James Avery storyline proves more difficult. As a young man, James pursues his desires so directly that he’s almost sociopathic. He develops a romantic triangle with a handsome young jock (Greg Morris) and the high school beauty queen (Kate Graham). Graham’s amusing role speaks of the responsibility and entitlement of the extremely good-looking: “Inner beauty is tricky because you can’t prove it.”

Valhalla commits to some weak jokes and peculiar detours under Peter Hardy’s direction, including a World War II musical number, “Soldiers Need Seamen,” that, despite Felten’s musical chops, belongs in a farce about gays in the military. The more Ludwig and James seek transcendence, however, the more intriguing the play becomes. James pursues seemingly unattainable love while Ludwig all but bankrupts his country, putting his throne at risk to build such structures as Neuschwanstein Castle, the model for Sleeping Beauty’s castle in Disneyland. In effect, both men want to live in castles in the air, but realities of their times bring them crashing to Earth to suffer fates as brutal as Shylock’s.

Both The Merchant of Venice and Valhalla depict conflicts with the materialistic world at a time when such definitions are becoming more ambiguous. In the 21st century, we live in an increasingly paperless economy, and goods such as music and other forms of entertainment exist in cyberspace, not on our shelves. I’m not sure if that makes prized ephemera more or less valuable, but shows as thought-provoking as The Merchant of Venice and Valhalla would be cheap at twice the price.