The Merchant of Venice is officially categorized as a problem play… and boy does it present problems. This week we go down the habit hole that is the Merchant of Venice with Terry Burnsed and Stephen Reinstein.
Terry Burnsed (He/Him/His) has been acting in Denver and environs for over four decades. He has a Masters and a PhD from CU Boulder, and served as Dramaturg for (the now defunct) CityStage ["CityStage" is one word here] Ensemble in the 1990s. CSE produced his first play The Heretic's Wake in 1990. He is currently at work on another tentatively titled Bloodthirsty Savages. He has taught theatre at MSU Denver, UC Denver, CCD, CC Aurora, and Front Range CC. Favorite roles include Roy Cohn and Prelapsarianov in Angels in America, Cusins in Major Barbara, King Lear, Titus Andronicus, Leopold Bloom in Chapter 15, Eddie in Hurlyburly, Salieri in Amadeus, Joseph Surface in The School for Scandal, and Feste and Malvoloio in Twelfth Night.
Stephen Reinstein (he/him) is a Boston-based actor, playwright, novelist, and theatre educator. He has performed with Amazing Mustache Productions and Here Comes Everybody Players (HCE), and traveled to Dublin with HCE in 2014 to perform during the Bloomsday Festival. Since 2011, Stephen has been a teaching artist at Wheelock Family Theatre, where he specializes in playwriting classes. From 2012-2015, he oversaw Wheelock's Emerging Playwrights Program for Boston teens, which he also co-founded. In 2019, Stephen took a brief hiatus from his theatre career to focus on parenthood (which also overlapped with surviving a global pandemic). Stephen's favorite Shakespeare play used to be Merchant of Venice but the antisemitism became a bit too hard to ignore, so now it's... let's say Hamlet? (Is that too cliché? I don't know, it's a classic, don't judge me.)
Follow Stephen on Twitter @reinface
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Art by Lizzy Colandene
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