Matthew Passion

photo: David Morgan

Nothing can grow in bad soil, and the idea of linking Christ's suffering on the cross to Matthew Shepard's death at the hands of gaybashers is about as fertile as cement. The play's brand of offensiveness is not the rock-your-world and challenge-your-beliefs kind, it's of the gleefully naive variety. There's an almost grade school level of innocent badness here, as we watch a completely oblivious Jesus visiting a gay bar, or as we see Matthew Shepard's two gaybashers dance a homoerotic dream ballet in their underwear around his dying body. The playwright (who also wrote the songs - yes, this is a musical) seems to be writing with commendable spirituality-affirming, gay-validating good intentions, but the road to hell, as they say...

Also blogged by: [David]