ajhlovestheatre

JUDGEMENT DAY

by Rob Ulin

directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel

Chicago Shakespeare Theater – The Yard, Chicago – until 2 June 2024

https://www.chicagoshakes.com/productions/2324-judgment-day/

I see a lot of theatre, but it has been quite some time since I heard an audience laughing as long and as loud as they did at this utterly delightful, entirely satisfying new comedy. Judgement Day hums along at the lick and pace of superior American sitcom, but also revels in the possibilities of theatre while providing a surprisingly compelling and thoughtful undertow of seriousness.

Writer Rob Ulin has created something with unexpected depth underneath the laughter, a piece that’s surely destined for a lengthy and profitable life beyond this (understandably) well received Chicago world premiere. Tony-nominated director Moritz von Stuelpnagel whips it up into an energised soufflé of good versus evil, belly laughs spiced with bracing cynicism, and a celebration of humanity in all its flawed, questioning magnificence and occasional awfulness.

If it initially plays out like a cartoon for adults, that means that when the emotional punch finally connects, it does so with a potency and piquancy that elevates the whole, glorious show to the next level. Thought provoking comedy isn’t the easiest thing to achieve in the theatre, but Judgement Day 100% succeeds.

The production’s not-so-secret weapon is Jason Alexander (still probably best known as Seinfeld’s George Costanza, but a versatile stage actor with an impressive list of credits) playing selfish, successful, morally bankrupt lawyer Sammy Campo, staring down the barrel of an eternity of damnation following a fatal heart attack when he’s visited by an avenging angel (Candy Buckley) who bears an uncanny resemblance to the Sunday School teacher he loathed as a kid. Buckley’s inspirationally weird celestial being (think Emma Thompson in the Angels In America movie crossed with the eccentric venom of Eileen Brennan as Captain Lewis in Private Benjamin then in her Emmy-nom’d turn as Jack’s acting teacher in Will & Grace) is finagled into giving him one chance to atone for his “disgusting, sinful, really fun life” or face a series of graphically described endless torments in a literal hell.

Campo interprets this as an opportunity to expiate his former lifestyle by performing a number of good deeds as a sort of point system while remaining essentially unchanged at his gleefully rotten core. He starts with his discarded wife (Maggie Bofill, exquisitely broken) who now works as a diner waitress as she struggles to bring up the son Sammy didn’t even know he had. Young actor Ellis Myers genuinely looks like Alexander’s mini-me and skilfully makes this kid diabolically badly behaved but impossible to hate, just like his Dad. Along the way, Campo also comes across Father Michael (Broadway’s Daniel Breaker, all charm, regret and wide-eyed befuddlement, just wonderful), a Catholic Priest having a massive crisis of faith. The uneasy ‘odd couple’ dynamic between Campo and Michael is a particular joy in an evening chock full of them.

Throw in a side-eyeing secretary with devastating comic timing (Olivia D Dawson), a blithely insensitive and downright strange Monsignor (an irresistible Michael Kostroff), a penniless ageing widow about to lose her forever home (Meg Thalken, as funny as she’s pitiful) and Joe Dempsey as the impervious forecloser on said house, and an individual so vile he almost makes Campo look sympathetic, and you have the recipe for a rich comic stew. The outcome – that genuinely doing good has a profound changing affect on Sammy – is predictable, but the journey to get there proves especially gripping, especially when Ulin throws a few plot curveballs which I’m not going to reveal here. It’s also cryingly, seat-shakingly funny, but that humour is made all the more enjoyable by the authentically ‘big’ questions the play poses to Sammy Campo and, by extension, to us.

This is a brilliant piece of writing, that cloaks its ingenuity and depth in a gallery of characters that initially seem stock types but reveal quirks and layers that surprise and delight, and in zany, irresistible humour. The casting of Jason Alexander is possibly the production’s biggest triumph. Sammy is such a repellent character, at least at the beginning, that the actor playing him could potentially be facing an uphill struggle to engage with an audience, and it is here that Alexander’s bolshy charm and infinite charisma prove invaluable. It’s hard to think of another actor other than perhaps Nathan Lane (and there are moments when Campo is reminiscent of the equally mendacious and venal Max Bialystock, who Alexander also played in The Producers’s West Coast premiere), who can simultaneously do irredeemably awful yet strangely lovable. Alexander has a natural dynamism plus the physical comedy of a great clown, the line delivery of a master, and when he needs to reveal his heart, does so with a delicacy that turns the head. He’s such a good actor, and Ulin’s writing matches him so well, that even when a forever-changed Sammy moans that “I walk around all day every day, giving a shit about people who are not me” it’s hilarious yet touching and entirely convincing. It’s a magnificent performance that turns a fine, spiky comedy into a compulsive dance of (possible) death.

The rest of the cast match Alexander’s brilliance, with Breaker and Bofill especially finding depth under the wit, while Dawson and Kostroff hitting every comic beat, and then some, in their roles. Beowulf Borritt’s giant stained glass window backdrop augmented by meticulously detailed smaller set pieces (Sammy’s office, an upscale bar, the vestibule of legal chambers, an antiquated confessional booth) sent slightly off-kilter by strange angles and perspectives works superbly.

So does everything else in this flat-out wonderful piece of theatre. Chicago Shakespeare Theater is currently represented on Broadway by Six and The Notebook, and it’s hard not to imagine this diabolically entertaining offering following in their footsteps, followed hopefully by a healthy international life. An unmissable treat.