Anthony Heald, Actor

Anthony Heald has been an actor at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival for six seasons. His roles include: Shag in Equivocation, Wolsey in Henry VIII, Patrick in The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler, Stage Manager in Our Town, Iago in Othello,  Man in The Turn of the Screw.  He’s also appeared on Broadway in Inherit the Wind, Love! Valour! Compassion! (Tony Award nomination),  and Anything Goes! (Tony Award nomination). His film and TV credits include Boston Public, Boston Legal, Navy NCIS, The Practice, X-Files, Frasier, Red Dragon, 8MM,Silence of the Lambs, A Time to Kill, The Client, The Pelican Brief, Postcards from the Edge.

In the 2010 OSF season he performed Shylock in The Merchant of Venice directed by Bill Rauch.

In this audio interview, he deconstructs in “Hath not a Jew…” speech for us and then performs it fully. In this OSF production of “Merchant,” Shylock is attacked by two men before delivering the speech directly to the audience. Music Credit: Todd Barton, long-time resident composer at OSF.

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Interview Transcript Excerpts

ON MERCHANT OF VENICE

ANTHONY HEALD: I go back to—to Shylock, you know. It’s—it’s fascinating that you have a character who is set up as a villain. He—he has to be a villain. He’s the usurer, he’s the—he’s the money lender. He’s the—he’s the one who brings the knife into court and—and strops it on the sole of his boot before, you know, ripping out a pound of flesh from this man.

But he’s upset by the fact that his daughter has sold the turquoise ring that his wife, Leah, gave him when he was a bachelor. It’s a detail that’s is in none of the source material that Shakespeare used. It serves no dramatic function in terms of the base story. But it’s this brilliant flash of character that Shakespeare puts in entirely to serve the character, entirely to open a window for the audience into some other aspect of this man’s soul that’s not immediately apparent in the story.

So whenever you’re doing popular art, you know, and film and television are the modern-day, you know, paradigms [laughingly], the only thing you can do is to just try and fill it with as much real, honest, truthful, revelatory detail as you possibly can and hope that there will be some deeper reverberations for those people in your audience who are prepared to receive them.

I mean, some—somebody that I was reading about Merchant of Venice talked about how the central issue, the central image, of the Jew as scapegoat, as the character on whom all the negative characteristics of the Christian community can be imposed and then sent out into the wilderness. It’s the recipient, the receptacle, for all our negative feelings for all our shame and guilt that gets put on Shylock. And Shylock is—is stripped of his money and stripped of his religion and sent out a man, just a—a crust of what he—what he once was; a man who’s totally, totally destroyed.

So he’s the scapegoat; that’s central to the story. But the question is, is the fact of the Jew as scapegoat, is that structural? Is that a fundamental truth that Shakespeare saw in his society and built into the structure of his play? Is it there because that’s the way the world is?

Or, does Shakespeare see it as a point that he wants to make dramatic use of? Is it thematic? Is the scapegoating of the Jew a theme that he wants to draw his audiences’ attention to? Is that something that he thinks is wrong and is he demonstrating, in the course of the play, the way in which this alien, this other, this stranger, is misused and abused by the dominant culture? Is that part of his point in writing the play?

And this—this writer, René Girard, says the genius of Shakespeare—his opinion is—is that the genius of Shakespeare is that the play does both. And it depends on the audience. If the audience is pre—is there for the story, for the blood and guts, they’ll—they’ll—they’ll see the scapegoating of the Jew as structural: that’s just the way the world is. And they won’t get upset by it.

But for those who are of a mind to pick up something further, he gives us enough clues to make us aware that there’s some injustice going on and that this is a theme, the scapegoating of the Jew, that he’s making very specific points about.

So the question, as an artist, in—in performing it, is how far do you go with that? You know. Where do you—how do you create a production that has the correct balance?I think with Merchant of Venice it’s one of the most difficult plays because there’s so much baggage that that play carries because of the history of the last sixty—sixty-five years. And it makes it an especially challenging play to—to perform now.

I argued very strongly against doing it. You know, Bill Rauch had meetings for three weeks with people from the festival to argue whether it should or should not be done. This is our seventy-fifth season and back in 1935 the first two productions that Angus Bowmer did at the site of what is now the Elizabethan Theater [Elizabethan Stage] in Ashland, were Twelfth Night and Merchant of Venice. They performed Merchant of Venice twice and Twelfth Night once.

And Bill Rauch felt that it was important in the seventy-fifth season to have both of those plays performed in the Elizabethan Theater. I argued very strongly against it. I said this is a play that is distasteful to a large section of our Jewish audience and to some of our Christian audience—and our non—non-Jewish audience, be they Christian or whatever. And that it—it’s not a play that can successfully be done in a post-Holocaust stage.

And Bill listened to a lot of input and finally decided he wanted to do it, and called me to inform me of his decision. And I said then you have to cast me as Shylock because there’s never been a Jew playing Shylock at the festival in the seventy-five years so far. And I want to be the first. I want to have a strong Jewish voice in rehearsals. And make sure that—that we’re not misrepresent—misrepresenting.

ON THE CHARACTERS OF SHAKESPEARE

ANTHONY HEALD: Well,  you know, what it—what it sparks in me is the realization that one of the things that makes playing Shakespeare so difficult—playing the character of Shakespeare so difficult—is that he went to great lengths to cover his tracks. He had no interest at all in being identified with any characters, or any positions that any characters took. He—when we hear the characters speak it’s very tempting at times to say Shakespeare says . . . . No, Shakespeare doesn’t say. King Lear says or Macbeth says, or Romeo says; the character says.

Shakespeare is a genius at entering into the minds and the thought processes of a myriad of characters with a myriad of viewpoints. And he can eloquently express diametrically opposed ideas. To think, “Ah, this is what Shakespeare thinks,” is to be led down a—a blind alley. You don’t know what Shakespeare thinks. That’s the problem, I think, with new historicists” critical thinking about Shakespeare.

It’s fascinating to know what was happening in Shakespeare’s life in the time that he wrote plays, but it infer that because it was a very tragic time in his life, that that’s a tragic—there’s a tragic theme to the plays, is—it’s folly. Because he wrote some of his most wonderful comedies in the years immediately following his son’s death. To think that because a character believes something really strongly, all that means is that Shakespeare has created a character who believes that. It doesn’t mean Shakespeare does.

The thing that’s great about him is that sometimes his characters get away from him. Sometimes he has a character—like I’m getting ready to do Shylock next year at the festival—and you have a story in—it’s a folk tale, it’s a legend, it’s the standard pound of flesh legend that’s been grafted onto a three-casket legend and the ring story, the—the switching of rings.

Some very basic fairy tale themes and frameworks have been cobbled together into this play, The Merchant of Venice. And the function of Shylock in that story is to present a threat to Antonio, a threat that can be met and vanquished by Portia.

So all Shakespeare needed to do was—in terms of Shylock—was create a character who would present a threat to Antonio, by threatening to cut a pound of flesh from whatever part of his body pleased him. And he created Shylock, who threatens to take over the entire play. His arguments, his language, his thought process, his character manifestations, are so strong, are so vibrant, are so filled with—with rich color that you can’t take your eyes off them.

And the same thing happened with [Sir John] Falstaff [Henry IV play], you know. And—and happens frequent—not frequently but happens a number of times in Shakespeare’s work. And that I find especially wonderful. When the—the playwright didn’t necessarily set out to write a story about a persecuted minority who gets pushed too far.

That’s not what the play’s about. The play’s about the triumph of mercy and the triumph of the forces of love over, you know, the—the forces of evil. And—but he became so fascinated with that character that he couldn’t stop. He just kept writing. Things came out—I’m sure some of the things that Shylock said came out of Shakespeare’s brain, just you know, like Mozart. Without a single blotting or correction, just flowed out like water.