Daniel Sullivan, Al Pacino do right by 'Merchant'

For years, Broadway director Daniel Sullivan has been on a quiet crusade to prove the British don't corner the market on doing right by Shakespeare.

Arguably, this is a debate America won long ago. But Sullivan (the former head of Seattle Repertory Theatre) bolsters the case with his staging of "The Merchant of Venice," a Public Theatre hit last summer in Central Park, and now a smash in a limited Broadway run at Broadhurst Theatre, set to close Jan. 9.

Sullivan and his cast, whose star attraction is Al Pacino as Shylock, give this problematic work the thoughtful, ambivalent rendering it requires. Part tragedy of bigotry, part queasy romantic comedy, the play often seems at war with itself.

In this reading, this textual dissonance is mediated by a keen emphasis on the character of Portia (Lily Rabe). The heiress who aids Antonio (Byron Jennings), the benefactor of her beloved, Bassanio (David Harbour), Portia prevents the Jewish moneylender Shylock from exacting his promised "pound of flesh" for an unpaid debt.

Masquerading as a lawyer, Portia not only prevents Antonio's likely death. She also coolly demolishes Shylock — financially, religiously and psychologically. (Sullivan depicts his humiliation vividly, with a silent image of Shylock's court-ordered baptism.)

Pacino, not always the most subtle of stage performers, gives a largely measured, searingly melancholic account of an eternal outsider who derives his only sense of power in a mercantile, anti-Semitic culture from financial manipulation.

But the great revelation here is Rabe. Daughter of the late actress Jill Clayburgh and the writer David Rabe, her husky voice and poised clarity befit Portia well.

But it is the ability to convey Portia's knowledge that by righting one wrong, she tips the scales of justice to wrong another, that makes the "quality of mercy" in this airing of "Merchant" feel so agonizingly strained.

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com