As if Bernie Madoff hasn’t inflicted enough suffering, now he has something else to atone for — inspiring “A User’s Guide to Hell, featuring Bernard Madoff,” Lee Blessing’s absurdist play imagining the notorious swindler in the afterlife.
Blessing, an excellent playwright who’s usually worked in a more realistic vein (“Cobb,” the Pulitzer Prize-nominated “A Walk in the Woods”), strains here to deliver a comic meditation on good and evil.
In this piece, the disgraced Madoff (Edward James Hyland), escorted by his personal tour guide, Verge (David Deblinger), encounters several of the underworld’s denizens, including Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele, 9/11 terrorist Mohamed Atta, a woman who killed her two children, and Madoff’s son, still wearing the dog collar around his neck that he used to hang himself.
“Are they still mad?” a befuddled Bernie Madoff asks Verge, in one of the few lines that ring true.
Rather than achieve the “eternal oblivion” to which he aspired, Madoff soon finds himself sexually assaulted by Atta, who’s yet to get the 72 virgins he was promised.
The play’s version of hell isn’t Dante’s Inferno but rather New York City, from Ground Zero circa 2002 to an underground sewer to Wall Street, where Madoff encounters a hedge fund manager and trader who freely admit their admiration.
“You served the cause of wealth” by becoming the face of the financial markets’ dysfunction and thereby providing a distraction from real reform, they tell him.
Unfortunately, this heavy-handed satire — directed just as blatantly by Michole Biancosino — falls flat. Despite some decent one-liners, such as Mengele’s admission that he’s not suffering the torments of hell but rather is “on staff,” it’s mostly tedious and unfunny.
There’s probably a great play, comedic or otherwise, to be written about Madoff’s crimes. But this one-act, which seems more like endless purgatory, isn’t it.