The Merchant of Venice is a comedy, something that has troubled most productions since the Holocaust, as the villain is an avaricious Jew whose impoverishment and humiliation serve as the climax of the play. The standard contemporary interpretation is to shift the focus altogether, to sideline Antonio, the title character, in favor of Shylock, and to transform the comedy into his tragedy. When Daniel Sullivan directed Merchant at the Delacorte in Central Park, he staged Shylock’s unwritten conversion. Al Pacino was shoved into a puddle three times—a kind of baptism—and each time, he had to retrieve and kiss his fallen kippah. It was heartbreaking, but it’s only one version of the play.

Igor Golyak, who has adapted and directed the current revival at Classic Stage Company, has taken a different approach. In tribute to the play’s roots in commedia dell’arte, this is a Merchant that has more in common with movies like Airplane! than it does with most stagings of Shakespeare. Antonio (T.R. Knight) is framed as the host of a television show, and Merchant becomes a play within the play, requiring elaborate and (without the framing device) offensive costumes. Shylock (Richard Topol) wears a Dracula cape and Grouch Marx glasses that include a Fagin nose. A stagehand (Stephen Ochsner) smears fake blood across his white shirt to top off the effect. I am quite confident it is the only production of Merchant you will have ever seen where Shylock delivers the “Hath a Jew not eyes?” speech to a pair of puppets.

The effect is liberating. Topol is absolutely unhinged, a monster from our collective id who delights in his malice and achieves the campy reverie that is usually reserved for more apolitical characters like Richard III. When he enters the courtroom to demand his pound of flesh, he carries a large piece of plastic, which he proceeds to unroll for the next few minutes. There were laughs here that I had never heard or found in my decade or so of reading and seeing this play. There is also a great gag at the beginning, where Antonio is trying to introduce the play while he gets caught up in an enormous scroll, culminating in some impressive aerial work.

I’m not sure everything works. The Batman costume and the extended riff on Mission: Impossible didn’t necessarily serve the script, and Knight is better with the modern dialogue than the Shakespearean. There is a hard turn at the end toward the serious that may be unearned. (Spoiler alert: Shylock ends up in a gas chamber.) Furthermore, Golyak has not made Antonio, like Shylock, into a type, even though his brand of pompous religious hypocrisy would be a fine target. This would also illuminate the parallels between the two characters, who end Merchant alone among the newlywed young. (And it would allow room for most of Act V, which is cut and reshuffled to earlier in the play.)

Still, this Merchant represents a significant break in the stranglehold the tragic interpretation has had on most productions of this play in my theater-going lifetime. I hope it augurs a flood of new (or old but new) takes.

The Merchant of Venice runs through December 22nd at the Classic Stage Company.  136 E. 13th Street  New York, NY.  2 hours.  No intermission. Photograph by Pavel Antonov.