Theater for a New Audience, the company responsible for some of the city’s finest Shakespeare productions in recent years, has added a new and perhaps unintentional footnote to its history of Bard advocacy.

By pairing “The Merchant of Venice” with Christopher Marlowe’s “The Jew of Malta” in repertory, TFANA presumably hoped to shed some light on how Shakespeare and his contemporary molded Elizabethan anti-Semitism to their own, very different purposes. But Darko Tresnjak’s crystalline production of “Merchant,” brought to shimmering life by an exemplary 14-person cast led by F. Murray Abraham, casts a decidedly unflattering light on its sister play, in which the conniving Barabas (Mr. Abraham again) lies, murders, and swindles his way through Malta.

That play, with its increasingly absurd plot twists, would have a tough time standing up to “Merchant” under any circumstances. (Shakespeare is believed to have written “Merchant” in response to the far broader “Malta,” which was in the midst of a successful revival at the time.) In the hands of director David Herskovits, however, Marlowe’s blast of comic nihilism degenerates into a skittish, undisciplined grab bag of distracting gimmicks. After seeing the same accomplished cast tackle both plays, Shakespeare has rarely looked better.

Mr. Tresnjak’s modern-day conception — three Apple laptops adorn John Lee Beatty’s stripped-down set, and nearly every scene involves a cell phone and/or Blackberry — adds a feverish but unforced immediacy to the piece, with each scene leading crisply into the next. And with the exception of John Lavelle’s histrionic Gratiano, the cast has adopted a singularly harmonious rapport. The climactic courtroom battle between Shylock and the disguised noblewoman Portia (a sharptongued Kate Forbes) crackles with intellectual rigor and mounting tension; just as strong, surprisingly, is the way Mr. Tresnjak infuses less-charged scenes, such as the ones in which various foreigners bid for Portia’s hand, with similar threads of intolerance.

Mr. Abraham’s Shylock addresses his fellow Venetians with a clear-eyed fatalism: His thoughts spill out unfiltered when he is alone or with his daughter, Jessica (a touching Nicole Lowrance), but he slows down in public, measuring the impact of each word and illustrating the constant perils dictated by his occupation and his faith. (By comparison, his Barabas, the marauding title character of “The Jew of Malta,” adopts a servile, wheedling cadence whenever dealing with gentiles, conforming to their vilest stereotypes.)

Shylock’s celebrated “Hath not a Jew eyes?” soliloquy is directed toward Solanio and Salerio, two of the play’s most virulent anti-Semites (which is saying something), and Mr. Abraham makes it clear that Shylock doesn’t plan on winning any converts. By the time he gets to “and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?,” the wind is all but knocked out of him. Mr. Abraham generally takes full advantage of the Duke Theater’s intimate space, tackling entire verses of text with each breath, but his words become thicker, more labored here. Shylock’s shoulders cave in, his bravado giving way to a nagging certainty that justice will forever remain beyond his reach. Mr. Abraham’s Shylock is filled with similarly revelatory moments; it is a performance for the ages.

His Barabas is nearly as strong, but TFANA’s “Malta” is as distracted as its “Merchant” is incisive. Mr. Beatty’s cartoonish “Malta” set could belong to a life-size Punchand-Judy show, and Mr. Herskovits brings a similar level of subtlety to the play. Granted, Marlowe’s ludicrous yarn — Barabas actually quintuple-crosses one character — hardly relies on gritty naturalism. But what begins as a handful of attention-getting but plausible directorial flourishes gradually devolves into a stylistic free-for-all.

By the time Barabas poisons an entire house filled with nuns, including his own daughter, Mr. Herskovits’s staging is aiming exclusively for the groundlings. Spankings, hip-hop argot, a protracted kung fu battle between two friars: Relegating Barabas to the sidelines of his own Grand Guignol opera can’t have been easy, but this production has found a way. Despite strong work from Mr. Abraham and from Arnie Burton as his amoral slave, this “Malta” feels less like a free-standing black comedy and more like a satyr play, the brief and bawdy palate cleansers that followed tragedies in ancient Greece.

I can’t help but wonder if this stems from a certain wariness at the protagonist’s unalloyed malevolence. Granted, Barabas’s troubles stem largely from the Maltese government confiscating his property, and Mr. Herskovits works hard to make the other religious sects just as contemptible as Judaism. (Pedophile-priest jokes have become de rigeuer onstage, but necrophilia is a new wrinkle.)

Beyond that initial slight, however, “Malta” makes not the slightest effort to temper or even explain Barabas’s rage. Harold Bloom describes Barabas as “Christopher Marlowe gone all out into lunatic zest and diabolic energy,” and this rapacity is harder to accommodate by modern standards. Shylock may want a pound of flesh as a symbolic death blow against the society that has shunned him, but his Maltese counterpart isn’t one for symbols. “For so I live, perish may all the world,” Barabas declares, and the world just about takes him up on his offer before “Malta” comes to its bloody close.

T.S. Eliot, who saw in Barabas a rawer, shrewder, more capable version of Shylock, credited Marlowe for creating “something which Shakespeare could not do, and which he did not want to do.” TFANA’s ambitious pairing endorses half of this statement: Mr. Herskovits paints a compelling case of why Shakespeare was ultimately disinclined to follow in Barabas’s footsteps, while the gifted Mr. Tresnjak demonstrates that the Bard could — and did — do just about anything.

“The Merchant of Venice” and “The Jew of Malta” in repertory until March 11 (229 W. 42nd St., between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, 212-239-6200).