[In the following review of Barbara Gaines's 1998 production of The Merchant of Venice, Napoleon concentrates exclusively on design elements that contributed to the project's evocation of urban America during the Roaring Twenties.]

Although Barbara Gaines decided to place the Shakespeare Repertory Theatre's The Merchant of Venice in a 1920s American city, she encouraged to adapt period and place to the play. Synthesizing authentic details that suggested the superficiality of the era with anachronistic elements that evoked the Roaring 20s, design stayed true to the feel of a period rather than the time itself.

Costume designer Nan Cibula-Jenkins says the design team brought pictorial research to the table early, and they knew why they deviated from historical accuracy in every instance. “Even though we were manipulating colors and styles, we wanted the audience to think they were watching people in the 20s. [Back then], all the bathing suits would have been navy or black,” she says; she used tropical colors to create a lighthearted ambiance for the Belmont scenes. “Navy would have given the piece a different feeling.”

Cibula-Jenkins, who built all the women's clothing and rented the majority of men's garments from the Royal Shakespeare Company, didn't use period undergarments in dance scenes; these would have “distracted from the period ideal. Barbara wanted us to grasp the period in its most idealistic form, so the world seemed almost pushed. She said, ‘It's like you're at a party, where everyone is forcing themselves to have a good time.’”

Avoiding visual clutter while suggesting a frenzied state, the design team created “a world force to the point that it was almost frenzied. Barbara wanted us to take the audience to the conclusion, to get on the train and go right to the station,” says Cibula-Jenkins.

Gaines opened her production at a rooftop party, where Antonio eventually separates himself from dancing revelers to reflect on his contrasting sadness. Seeking colors and textures that would reflect a world out of kilter, Cibula-Jenkins balanced the langourous middle Belmont scenes with forced gaiety in party scenes that framed them at the end as well as its start. … Middle Belmont scenes featured pastels and soft flowing silk chiffons, the more relaxed textures echoing the times. Men wore tail coats in many scenes.

The first time in Western history that women discarded corsets, skirts in the 20s were “incredibly short compared to those worn ten years earlier. Women cut their hair off, an amazing idea. They had been quietly painting their lips, but now they came out and wore makeup overtly. It was a huge breakthrough.” Cibula-Jenkins notes that women capable of changes in style were also capable of taking matters in their own hands, as Portia and Nerissa do. “As soon as you pick the 20s, you're in an age when anything goes, a new age of liberation.”

But while people celebrated the end of the war and what they imagined would be a carefree future, immigrants struggled with harsh conditions, and the racism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Christianity of the times matched those in Shakespeare's Venice.

Because Elizabethan audiences knew Venice as a place of the kind of monetary exchange we associate with present-day Wall Street, and we have romantic visions of the Italian city, Gaines relocated the play spatially as well as temporally. Cibula-Jenkins and set designer Neil Patel exchanged swatches and talked about yellows and blues in Belmont, with cool grays and metallic for city scenes. Patel took his cue from 30s Art Deco, as furniture with hard edges provided the austere look he wanted. His public place resembled a bank lobby, undecorated and cold. Using the same space as the courtroom with minor adjustments, mainly the addition of a few benches, Patel didn't try to hide the public space but allowed it to resonate throughout the climactic scene. The same space functioned as Shylock's home, again by moving a few pieces of furniture.

Patel provided contrast in the Belmont scenes, for which he used a water motif. We meet Portia on a beach, and revelers dance around a reflecting pool during the final party scene. Again, little changed by Robert Christen transformed the space with warm lights.

Instead of asking sound designer Robert Neuhaus to locate period songs, Gaines commissioned an original score from Aleric Jans, who matched the frenzy of the scenography with an over-the-top driven score, consistent with the sound of the times.

Design elements combined to create an effect that is different from any one of them. “Take that music,” says Cibula-Jenkins, “and the 30s furniture and my costumes, and it feels like the 1920s.”