Trying to fix what Shakespeare got wrong

To say that playwright Sarah Mantell is no fan of “The Merchant of Venice” would be several thousand ducats’ worth of understatement.

“It’s a really deeply antisemitic play. It’s a really sexist play. It’s a really racist, anti-Black play,” the New York City-based writer says. A memorable glimpse of the work at the Yale School of Drama left Mantell “extremely disturbed and upset” and with a self-imposed mandate: “Shakespeare didn’t know what he was doing, and I need to fix it for him.”

That fix is currently running at Baltimore Center Stage. “Everything That Never Happened” retells “Merchant” from the perspective of several less-prominent characters: Jessica, the daughter of the Jewish moneylender Shylock; Lorenzo, the Christian man she falls in love with; and the servant Gobbo, who in Mantell’s telling is much more than Shakespeare’s malaprop-prone comic device. When Shylock makes an appearance, it’s as a tender, anxious, often baffled father. (The prince of Morocco, whose dark skin color is disparaged in “Merchant,” does not appear.)

Mantell’s is not the only current play foregrounding the Bard’s supporting characters. Opening next month at the Folger Theatre is Lauren M. Gunderson’s “A Room in the Castle,” which reimagines “Hamlet” from the viewpoints of Ophelia and Gertrude, plus a newly conceived servant figure, Anna. The world-premiere staging is co-produced with Cincinnati Shakespeare Company, which debuted the piece last month.

The works by Mantell, who is nonbinary, and Gunderson arrive amid a burst of plays that refashion, rebuke or riff on the male-written canon. “Problems Between Sisters,” a response to Sam Shepard’s “True West” seen last year at Studio Theatre, is part of Julia May Jonas’s cycle reconceiving macho American classics. Barbara Cassidy’s “Mrs. Loman,” recently mounted in New York, extends the narrative of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman.” Opening soon on Broadway is Kimberly Belflower’s “John Proctor Is the Villain,” a play (premiered at Studio in 2022) that calls out the sexism in Miller’s “The Crucible.” In a culture that has recently reckoned with elevating long-sidelined voices and perspectives, the theatrical old boys network is fair game.

Other art forms have also gotten in on the action, including by centering characters to whom Shakespeare gave limited scope: The 2019 movie “Ophelia” adapted Lisa Klein’s revisionist young-adult novel. (The landmark reframing of William S.’s also-ran figures remains Tom Stoppard’s 1960s “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.”)

“I think we’re due for a lot of canonical correction, and we can do it pointedly, and we can do it joyfully, and we can do it with humor,” says Mantell, whose other works include “Fight Call,” a play about a theater company’s years of rehearsing the death scenes of female Shakespeare characters.

Canonical correction for the antisemitic “Merchant” seemed particularly urgent to Mantell, who is Jewish. They perceived “a play living just underneath the surface of Shakespeare’s story” that spoke of “assimilation and passing, and what we leave behind for love.” That more enlightened play, Mantell resolved, would allow Shylock and Jessica to “speak in Jewish voices” and “give them back their history and their humor. Their heartbreak.”

But to do justice to the project – which reached a milestone with “Everything That Never Happened’s” world premiere in Pasadena, California, in 2018 – Mantell had to spend significant time reading, and thinking about, “Merchant.”

“That really sucked,” they say.

“A Room in the Castle” comes from a place of more warmth. The prolific and widely produced Gunderson is perhaps best known for penning plays about historical female scientists. But she is a self-described Shakespeare superfan who has tangled with the Swan of Avon in works like “The Book of Will,” about the 1623 First Folio, and “The Taming,” a political farce that nods to “The Taming of the Shrew.” Gunderson says more Stratford-fueled pieces are in the works – maybe many more. “I have this running challenge to myself to meet each Shakespeare play with some interpretation,” she says.

When it came to tapping into “Hamlet,” Gunderson says, “my instinct has always been to save Ophelia – at least to understand her, if I can’t find a way to save her.” “A Room in the Castle” grew from that urge, turning Hamlet’s ex-girlfriend into a gutsy songwriter – “I sort of imagine her as a young Taylor Swift” – who bonds and conspires with a force-of-maternal-nature Gertrude and handmaiden Anna as the prince of Elsinore goes off the rails.

“The play is really about that coming together of people who did not expect to be on the same team because the patriarchy kept them apart,” Gunderson says. She believes the work is also a timely exploration of “the cost of male vengeance and violence.”

Both Gunderson and Mantell emphasize that their plays are understandable to audiences who have forgotten or avoided “Hamlet” and “Merchant.” And both say that for theatergoers who know these classics well, there are satisfying Easter eggs.

The two plays previously aired in the Folger’s Reading Room Festival, an annual celebration of new work and conversations that bounce off Shakespeare. “Lauren and Sarah represent people who are really taking the things that we’re most familiar with in Shakespeare and activating them in contemporary thought,” said Karen Ann Daniels, the Folger Theatre’s artistic director.

Shakespeare, Gunderson points out, “is strong enough to withstand interrogation and reimagining.” She sees her Bard-saluting plays as a “big handshake of playwrights across time.”

For Mantell, the gesture is more like a judo throw. “Merchant,” they say, “was the piece of the canon that I could overturn” so that people might stop and think, “Hey, you know, something might be up with this! Maybe the best storytelling is not white, male and British to its bones.”