The Merchant of Venice (opera) 2013. Keith Warner directed the production, which was also supported by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute and the Grand Theatre – National Opera, Warsaw. The opera libretto follows the plot of the original play very closely, generally using Shakespeare's own words. Many of the minor characters are excised. Act I introduces the melancholy merchant Antonio, his friend Bassanio who asks Antonio for money to back his wooing of Portia, the Jewish moneylender Shylock, his daughter Jessica and her Gentile lover, Lorenzo. Despite evident mutual personal animosity, Shylock agrees to lend Antonio 3000 ducats against the pledge of a pound of the
Lyman S. Ayres II (1913) Lyman II grew up in Indianapolis. At the age of twenty-one he replaced his middle name with the initial S. Lyman II graduated "cum laude" from Yale University. He served as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy in the South Pacific during World War II. Lyman's grandfather, Lyman S. Ayres, a dry goods merchant from Oswego, New York, founded the L. S. Ayres retail department store in Indianapolis in 1872. Lyman II's father, Fred, was president of the family's department store business from 1896 until 1940. On September 22, 1934, Ayres married Isabel Ferguson, the daughter of Eliza and