We went to see the last days of judas iscariot last night. It’s a new play by Stephen Adly Guirgis, directed by Rupert Goold. They’re two of the hottest shits in international theatre right now. Goold’s previous production of macbeth, with Patrick Stewart, was the best-reviewed London show of last year, and Guirgis winning Olivier awards, rave reviews from timeout new york, and winning competitions at the Edinburgh fringe festival. I was really excited to see this play.

And I hated it. Completely and utterly, I hated it. It was a severe let down that has me wondering, yet again, if it’s just theatre that I don’t like. Because if this is the best stuff being done by the best creators in the field, the shining star of the theatre world, then god damn- sign me up for the planet farthest from it.

The basic concept of the piece is lifted directly from defending your life, the Albert Brooks picture. In the last days of judas iscariot, as in defending your life, the afterlife is an American courtroom, and people are judged on their ability to change and learn from the mistakes they made in life. Successfully appealing before the judge results in being elevated from one plane to the next- as in defending your life, it deals with characters stuck in purgatory, while lawyers enter a courtroom to argue in front of a judge the client’s worthiness to enter heaven.

Within the setting of Albert Brooks’ world, essentially, this play is about an appeal by a plucky young New York attorney trying to make a name for herself made in the name of Judas.

What really bothered me about the play is that, for a writer who’s considered such hot shit for the freshness of his work, the characters here are almost nothing but cliches. The defense attorney is every brassy female lawyer you’ve seen in any courtroom drama; the prosecuting attorney is a zany Middle Eastern man in a rumpled suit full of sleazy come-ons and Borat’s understanding of the English language. The various saints and angels and mythical creatures are played either entirely by-the-book (Satan shows up, check it out, in an Armani suit!) or with the most blindingly obvious inversions of expectation. St Monica, the patron saint of patience, is loud and brash and feisty, talking in what someone must have told Guirgis was hip-hop lingo back in 1991. One of the play’s only virtues was that the costume director had enough restraint not to put a big clock around her neck. word to your mother!

And it’s frustrating, because all of this is played for laughs, but the only joke is that the really obvious and low expectations of the audience are being defied in ways that wink at them. you are a mostly white theatre-going audience in london, the production says, watching a play about religion. you expect the holy figures to be pious, and so they will instead swear. you expect them to be white, so they will be black. you expect them to speak properly, so instead they will say things like ‘them bitches don’t know shit’, and you will laugh. It’s insulting to both the people that Guirgis’ stereotypes are based on (or were based on, twenty years ago, when people maybe talked like that) and the audience, for these things to be played as a gag. Knowing that your audience is made up of people whose experiences are such that people talking like they just stepped in off a Salt-n-Pepa record is the height of comedy to them, and playing to that, is not progressive and challenging theatre.

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen something in London or Chicago that was hyped as the hottest thing going on the stage, only to find my intelligence insulted and the novelty of the fact that, like, it was theatre expected to overcome the fact that the writing is bad. Maybe it really is the medium that I have a problem with. Because even writers I have endless amounts of respect for- people like Cormac McCarthy and Don Delillo- have announced shows that got me buying tickets for opening night, and then when I show up, they drop turds in my drink. Maybe I just don’t get the point of theatre, if it’s not to do something new.

Incidentally, if this has made you curious, y’all Chicago motherfuckas can check out a mad def production, yo, at the Gift Theatre in Jefferson Park (see what I did there?). But I obviously don’t recommend it.