“History is more complicated than the simple version we’re told in school or around the dinner table, says South Coast Repertory’s artistic director, Marc Masterson.He is talking about Lyndon Baines Johnson in “All the Way,” the Costa Mesa theater’s main-stage season-opener, but the observation also fits the polarizing fictional figure in the play he chose for SCR’s second stage. In “District Merchants,” the Shylock of Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” is re-imagined as a businessman and moneylender in Reconstruction-era Washington, D.C. Both plays capture America’s struggle to follow its better impulses against the headwinds of prejudice, partisanship and self-interest.” To read more, click here.