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Peter Sellars's Merchant of Venice: A Retrospective Critique of Process

This article offers a dramaturg's perspective on the day-to-day rehearsal activities of the director Peter Sellars as he prepared his highly controversial production of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice at Chicago's Goodman Theatre in 1994. Because Sellars had conceptualized his production well before his arrival in Chicago, and because he was inaccessible prior to the first rehearsal, the usual pre-production collaboration could not take place. On one level the article is about the dramaturg being thrust into the thick of an unusual process and finding his role(s) along the way: as enquiring interlocutor asking questions to clarify the proceedings for self and for the audience, another as documenter. Sellars readily agreed that any other person's perceptions of his process are different from his own. My purpose here is to offer a dramaturg's-eye view of the working methods of one of contemporary theatre's most iconoclastic and innovative directors, along with some critical reflections on the process.