Playwright Rob Ulin’s “Judgment Day” is a mildly amusing 30-minute sitcom inflated to fill two hours’ traffic on the stage and gilded with a wafer-thin exploration of some of life’s greatest moral conundrums.
Directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel, Ulin’s play is of a piece with his long career writing and producing sitcoms including “Roseanne,” “Malcolm in the Middle” and “Young Sheldon.” The laughs are broad and as predictable as a laugh track. In “Judgment Day,” they’re also often bluer than a corpse on a slab.
Our anti-hero in the comedy running through May 26 at Chicago Shakespeare’s Yard is lawyer Sammy Campo (Jason Alexander of “Seinfeld” fame). We know he’s a terrible person from the opening moments, when he’s closing a deal with a client worried about the use of unpaid child labor in his overseas manufacturing business. Sammy argues they’re merely providing the children with a sense of purpose by providing craft projects that happen to turn into sellable garments. Cue the laugh track.
But just as Sammy is celebrating his successful deal along with his stone-faced assistant Della (Olivia Denise Dawson), he keels over and dies. Or rather, dies just long enough for an Angel (Candy Buckley) to put the fear of hell into him. In the Angel’s description, Sammy is headed to a terrible place in the afterlife filled with flesh-eating worms of fire.
Predictably, Sammy is somehow miraculously revived, and vows to change his ways. While he’s determined to do enough good deeds to get into heaven, he intends to preserve his empathy-free heart while doing so. (Per the Angel, it’s only deeds that matter when God is determining whether you have enough points to stay out of hell; whether you’re doing them for selfish or altruistic matters doesn’t matter.)
As Sammy attempts to do good, the show’s brief, two- and three-person scenes’ action moves from Sammy’s office, to a Catholic confessional, to the home of Sammy’s wife Tracy (Maggie Bofill), whom he abandoned a decade earlier.
Sammy’s redemption tour begins in that confessional, as he turns to Father Michael (Daniel Breaker) in an attempt to figure out the “rock bottom” number of good deeds he has to complete in order to avoid his terrifying fate.
Breaker’s Father Michael is the beating heart of “Judgment Day,” as he faces a crisis of faith that is at once provocative and relatable. As Tracy, Bolfill is also solid, bringing a believably world-weary skepticism to an underwritten part. She’s hampered by Ulin’s script, which adheres to the school of comedy that says if punching Sammy once is funny, punching him three times must be hilarious. I’d argue it’s just repetitive.
Then there’s Edna, the poor Catholic widow whose case Sammy takes on at the behest of Father Michael. Veteran Chicago actor Meg Thalken is reduced to playing Edna as an old lady stereotype, weepy yet still shrill, utterly helpless and largely defined by a frumpy wig and ill-fitting support hose.
As the Angel dispensing God’s “immutable” wisdom, Buckley is charged with being both harridan and sexpot, the latter arriving via a costume/wig reveal that’s about as original a concept as an AI-generated homily.
Alexander is most famously known for playing George Costanza on “Seinfeld,” and his Sammy, whose flaws are cartoonishly bloated, is little more than a flattened, exaggerated version of the TV character.
“Judgment Day” feels swallowed up by the large stage at Chicago Shakespeare’s Yard. The actors are dwarfed by set designer Beowulf Boritt’s massive, brightly colored backdrop depicting a towering image of Lady Justice, blindfolded and hovering amid a psychedelic spray of orange and yellow clouds. It’s an example of eye candy attempting to make up for a lack of dramatic substance.
There is plenty of dramatic red meat to be had from questions of mortality, morality and the afterlife. Likewise, the discussion of whether nefarious means are justified if they lead to beneficent ends. But Ulin offers little but thin gruel and sophomoric humor that not even the copious amounts of stage fog can hide.
