Native empathy

Graham Greene stars as Shylock in this summer's Stratford Festival production of The Merchant of Venice. (David Hou/Stratford Festival of Canada)

Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice is often slammed as anti-Semitic, but actor Graham Greene — who stars as the Jewish moneylender Shylock in the Stratford Festival’s new production, opening June 1 — sees his character as a victim, not a villain.

“Shylock, he’s the one who gets boned, big time,” says a gruffly affable Greene, who is a master of the pithy summary. “He loses everything — his daughter, his money, his house. He’s completely reduced to nothing and forced to convert to Christianity on top of it.”

The Venetian Christians, meanwhile, who preach to Shylock about mercy and forgiveness when he insists on his pound of flesh for an unpaid loan, wind up with his riches. “Even [Shylock’s] rotten son-in-law Lorenzo doesn’t care about his wife anymore when he finds out he gets the inheritance from Shylock,” says Greene, suddenly erupting into one of his huge, cackling laughs. “They’re an ugly bunch of characters — brutal. This play makes Christians look like complete animals. It just cracks me up.”

Greene, 55, is sitting for this late-morning interview backstage at the Festival Theatre, where, apart from some sniffles due to spring allergies, he’s appearing fit and relaxed. He’s clad in a chill-out ensemble of sweatpants, T-shirt and black leather vest, but this evening he’ll don a grey businessman’s suit for his role in director Richard Rose’s semi-modern-dress Merchant, as well as acquiring a yarmulke and prayer shawl, or tallit.

The idea of having Canada’s best-known First Nations actor play Shakespeare’s Hebrew antihero is an inspired stroke of casting. Sadly enough, if you’re trying to put the marginalized, ghetto-confined Jews of Renaissance Italy into a Canadian context, this country’s aboriginal people immediately spring to mind. “Shylock’s forced conversion to Christianity is not unlike the First Nations people being forced into Christianity,” notes Greene, an Oneida who was born on Ontario’s Six Nations Reserve.

And the fundamental misunderstanding between Shylock and his Christian clients brings to mind such ongoing disputes as the continuing Caledonia land claim dispute in southern Ontario. “There are a lot of parallels there,” says Greene.

Although, he adds, that’s not the reason why he grabbed the chance to play Shylock and return to theatre for the first time since 1990 — the year his Oscar-nominated performance in Dances With Wolves catapulted him into a movie career.

Greene dons a yarmulke and prayer shawl for his role as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. (David Hou/Stratford Festival of Canada)

“I just wanted to get back to the stage,” he explains. “Film and television weren’t interesting to me any more.”

The Stratford opportunity presented itself by chance, when Greene and his wife, Hilary, were dining in Toronto (they live north of the city in Uxbridge) and Richard Monette, the festival’s soon-to-retire artistic director, was seated next to them. “A conversation started up and I mentioned I would like to come for a season,” says Greene. “His eyes widened and, the next thing you know, the phone calls started to happen.”

Greene and Monette hashed out what kind of vehicle would best suit the actor. “One of my ideas was doing The Odd Couple with [Stratford star] Brian Bedford, in period costumes, set in a Hudson’s Bay outpost,” Greene claims, letting loose another laugh. “I’d pay money to see that.”

Instead, they settled on The Merchant of Venice and the part of the mentally challenged migrant worker Lennie in a revival of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men.

Steinbeck’s 20th-century classic is the kind of modern play Greene performed back in his theatre days, but Merchant marks the first time he has acted Shakespeare professionally, let alone played a major Shakespearean role. “Bending my head around [the text] was kind of difficult,” he admits.

He’s got solid support with this production, where the cast includes experienced Shakespeareans like festival vet Scott Wentworth, who plays Antonio, the merchant of the title, and the estimable Severn Thompson as Portia, the sharp-witted heroine whose legal savvy saves Antonio from Shylock’s knife. Director Rose has emphasized the religious divide in the play — while Shylock wears his tallit, the Christians participate in Ash Wednesday and Palm Sunday rituals — but he has also underscored the humour in a work that is traditionally categorized as a comedy.

“I was shocked the night we came out and did the first preview and there was laughter everywhere,” says Greene. “It’s true, it’s a brutal play, but Richard has injected a lot of funny moments into it.”

Although Greene came of age in Hamilton, not far from Stratford, he wasn’t one of those kids who got introduced to the Bard via school field trips to the festival. In fact, he had no great interest in theatre or literature, and went through a series of manual jobs — “a carpet layer, carpenter, welder, iron worker, draughtsman, roadie,” he ticks off — before deciding to try the acting game.

His theatre career spiked in 1990, when he won Toronto’s Dora Mavor Moore Award for his performance in Tomson Highway’s landmark play, Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing. By then, Kevin Costner had come calling. “The morning after I got the award, I left town to start Dances With Wolves,” says Greene. “I borrowed 60 bucks from my girlfriend, who is now my wife, and, in a borrowed suit, I flew to South Dakota to start work.”

Felicity Huffman, left, and Graham Greene in a scene from the independent film Transamerica. (Jessica Miglio/Weinstein Company/Associated Press)

His role as the Sioux holy man Kicking Bird in Costner’s frontier epic earned Greene an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor and parts in more Hollywood movies, including Thunderheart with Val Kilmer, Maverick with Mel Gibson and Jodie Foster, and The Green Mile with Tom Hanks. He also amassed a long list of TV credits, from hosting Exhibit A, a true-crime series that anticipated the CSI craze, to appearing in the children’s series Dudley the Dragon, which bagged him a couple of Gemini Awards.

More recently, he brought his easygoing charm to the critically acclaimed 2005 indie film Transamerica, in which he played a New Mexico rancher who falls for Felicity Huffman’s in-transit transsexual.

Greene says he had a great time making that movie. “I just loved Felicity to bits, she’s right on the money. She does her homework and shows up and it’s just, ‘Let’s work!’ We were always having a race to see who could get to the set first.”

But experiences like that have been fewer and further between of late, which is why Greene decided it was time to tread the boards again. Not only does he find it more artistically satisfying right now, it’s also healthier.

“There’s a lot of down time between films and I started watching cooking shows to pass the time,” he reveals. “I don’t know why, it’s not that I’m a big foodie, but I started cooking gourmet meals. I ended up at 230 pounds. I thought, ‘Oh, this is enough!’ My knee was killing me from the extra 30 pounds I was carrying around.” He went on a diet, started cooking sensibly and speed-walked for an hour every day until he was down to a trim 190.

Greene will have no time to get flabby at Stratford, where his two leading roles require him to keep in top physical and mental shape. “You only get one take in theatre,” he jokes. You won’t hear him grouse, though; unlike the shafted Shylock, he considers himself a very lucky man.

“It never occurred to me that I would one day be here in Stratford at 55 years of age,” he says. “It’s just one of those things where somebody throws a gem in your path and you pick it up.”

The Merchant of Venice is now in previews, opens June 1 and runs to Oct. 27 at the Stratford Festival in Ontario.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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