[In the following review, Klein assesses Richard Corley's production of The Merchant of Venice for the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival, contending that although it attempted to develop the play's romantic and comic features, it failed to offer an original take on Shakespeare's ambivalent treatment of Shylock.]

No kidding, The Merchant of Venice is a comedy.

Categorically speaking, that's not news to Shakespearean mavens, but it's invariably a surprise. The play is not a comic read, and it is rarely played for laughs. Richard Corley, the director of the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival's production here, seems hell-bent on proving that Merchant is merry and very romantic. We don't have to believe it, but it's a fair try.

In one of those audience-friendly surveys that theaters are obliged to conduct randomly to show they care about what audiences want to see, the festival has come up with a finding that astounds. A news release says that, in recent years, the one most requested play in the canon is not Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet. It is not even Titus Andronicus. No kidding, it is The Merchant of Venice. That Shakespeare's distressing, in many ways unfathomable, and, after more than 400 years, still hotly debated play, is at the top in what amounts to a popularity poll, must mean that thoughtful people are still trying to figure it out. Or to see it performed coherently.

Mr. Corley may not have figured it out, but he knows it is supposed to be a comedy. No tragedy tonight, not when the title character, who's no hero, would fall from a very low place if he were killed. His name is Antonio and he is saved by a hair, from a knife held high—a moment that is definitely played for laughs, and gets them.

And so what if Antonio's would-be murderer is humiliated beyond hope? One villain was going to cut hazardously close to another villain's heart. In a time-honored reversal of theatrical fate, the man who is forced to play the victim triumphs, viciousness renewed, and the vengeful knife-wielder is stripped of his figurative heart and soul, his religious identity, his reason to live. And he has no choice but to say: “I am content.” Death of the spirit does not define tragedy.

Besides, his name is Shylock, but that's another story. You feel sorry for him or you don't. Either way, otherwise wise people will be giving you their views for another 400 years.

In Mr. Corley's staging, Nicholas Kepros plays Shylock for pathos, which is very wrong, obvious and sadly stereotypical, but that's a small mistake in a production as dismissive of Shylock as the play is.

If the actor's accent of studied rising inflections and his ill-advised gesticulations have something to do with the director's ostensible accent on comedy, that's a big mistake. It only keeps Shylock at a stock level, without daring to depict him as the mad clown Shakespeare likely intended him to be.

From offstage revelries at the start, to the riddle of the caskets, with Portia's suitors, and the deception involving the wedding rings, both played out in the manner of opera buffa, Mr. Corley's notions about frivolous people work to good comic effect.

And it is audience-winning, especially in the giddy, humorous interplay between Portia (Kate Forbes as a sexy, manipulative, power-driven modern woman, as much shrew as shrewd) and Nerissa (Veronica Watt, an affectionate and assertive maid and friend).

And Phillip Christian, funny with attitude, comes to woo Portia wealthily and more opportunistically as the Prince of Morocco, lending an air of lightness to a production determined to be diverting.

Ah, but underneath. Mr. Corley appears to have a grip on a newly disturbing dimension of a play that will never cease to disturb. The shallow players are all about themselves in a world that is all about money in the contemporary society that Mr. Corley's moderndress production substitutes for 16th-century cities, both real (Venice) and imaginary (Belmont).

To perceive the play as more about business, power and ego than about religion is an attempt to deflect the stigma of anti-Semitism that taints it. Yet that stigma is inescapable. Although Portia is the major player and Antonio is the title character, the specter of Shylock—remember the play is not titled “The Jew of Venice”—haunts the mind, throws the play out of whack and obsesses scholars, actors and compassionate human beings who seek his redemption, as Shakespeare did not.

Mr. Corley goes halfway with showiness and resonance. What the director cannot unravel or perhaps interweave are the disparate plays-within-plays Shakespeare wrote. And Shylock, perhaps the starriest supporting role of all time, is an unforgiving as well as an unforgivable monster, a mere cartoon, a treacherous hero, a heartbreaking villain, an unmerciful forlorn outcast or all of the above. Still, he exists outside the play, the error in the comedy and a real downer as ever.

This production does not attempt to draw him in, or to provide a brave, original, authoritative spin on a playwright's ambivalence that has turned into a lamentable universal symbol.

What is the world that would accommodate Shylock, anyway? Portia, the faux arbiter of justice, preaching mercy, practicing the politics of guile, and her compatriots are despicable, with less dimension, but more charm. It's facile and too fashionable to resolve it all by simply calling The Merchant of Venice a dark comedy. It is a disconnected, troubling, irreconcilable play that proves festival audiences want to think and argue.

Go figure is a commonplace command. How often does it go so deep?