made me want to kms. five stars. i read this purely on a whim and i'm so happy that i did. such an interesting and deeply fun idea for a play -- put judas iscariot on trial and make every supernatural being in attendance talk like a new yorker u kidnapped on their way out of a bodega.

in all seriousness, this play gives us judas iscariot and asks us a theological question: does judas deserve it? he rots in the deepest circle of hell, and he'll continue to for eternity. his betrayal was essential. god and his heavenly hosts and the whole world needed it to happen, or there never would've been a story. but can we say that's fate? can we say it was him? is it fair? we turn over these questions over and over as an audience, trying to understand what led judas to do what he did. what is it abt this crime that makes it unforgivable? we wait for it. but then the play says no, that's irrelevant. it doesn't matter whether WE think he deserves it or not. what matters is that HE thinks he does. he wallows in his guilt and self-hatred, is catatonic with his grief. his hate is so strong that jesus can whisper forgiveness in his ear or shout it from the rooftops and it won't matter, judas won't hear a word of it. "why didn't u make me good enough so you could've loved me" becomes "if you'd loved me, i never would've been the person capable of doing what i did."

heaven and hell -- salvation and damnation -- are states of mind. nothing but u is capable of clouding god's love for u. "if god came to you, would you believe in him then?" means if god told u u were worthy, would you believe him? and the answer is no. ur guilt and disappointment has taught u helplessness, like those animals that stay in their cages even when the door is opened. to love god u have to first forgive urself. ( )

Ah, well. I suppose you can only experience disappointment if you have hopes for something, and I certainly did have hopes for Stephen Adly Guirgis' play The Last Days of Judas Iscariot. I have long been fascinated by the awkward theological question posed by the life of Judas, whose betrayal of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane was necessary to fulfil the Christ prophecy, and indeed was encouraged by Jesus himself. But if Judas was fated to fulfil the prophecy, what does that say about his exercise of free will? And if it was his destiny, isn't it even more unfair to condemn him to eternal damnation for 'betraying' his friend? (If I was reviewing the Bible here, I'd be saying: hey, major plot holes. What sort of hack wrote this?) Furthermore, doesn't the concept of eternal punishment contradict the belief that God's forgiveness is all-encompassing? These are the sort of questions which Guirgis' play ostensibly seeks to address. Unfortunately, it turned out to be rather underwhelming.

This was entirely because the execution was very poor. It takes a peculiar kind of conceit to make such a compelling and stimulating set of ideas boring, but Guirgis manages it. The most egregious and most commonly-cited flaw in the play is its use of what sympathetic reviewers have euphemistically termed 'urban vernacular'. For some inexplicable reason, Guirgis has all his characters – Pontius Pilate, Satan, you name it – come from Da Hood, using slang words like 'gangsta' regularly. On page 17, Saint Monica, who apparently has mad saintly connects" and will "mess your shit up", riffs about "mothafuckahs" and "all y'all niggas". Now, no doubt this sounds funny to a potential reader, but it's actually not; Guirgis is a grown man and his decision prevents you from truly immersing yourself in the story's ideas or believing in the characters. Unlike some, I have no problem with the swearing, other than the fact that it is done needlessly (I don't mean 'needless' in a moralising, 'tut-tut' sort of way, just needless in that it has no impact on the force of the dialogue. The F-bomb here has the blast radius of a small fart.) Rather, it is the overall approach which I find baffling; I can think of no artistic reason for this decision whatsoever. The claim of some reviewers that it makes the Biblical figures more 'relevant' and 'universal' to a modern audience is absurdly weak to say the least. Audiences seem to have no problem engaging with historical dramas and suchlike without having Henry VIII saying "Yo, yo, slice that bitch's head off, niggas", so I don't see why Guirgis thought it necessary for his theological contemplation of the nature of free will. His decision represents the modern vogue for artistic pretentiousness – the desire to be different and 'edgy' – taken to its most cartoonish extreme. (Also, at one point someone actually says "wowee zowee". I know that's not urban, but I thought it was worthy of note.)

Furthermore, the plotline is extremely sketchy, like the whole play was a first draft dashed off on Guirgis' lunch break. We are given no intimation about why Judas' case is being put before a court, who this Cunningham woman is and her motivations for representing Judas or, indeed, why there is even a court to hear such a case in the first place. The awkward theological questions mentioned above are raised but never thoroughly explored and certainly not resolved. Overall, the play lunges between didactic theological debate and scenes of unlikely characters talking like wannabe 'gangstas' from the hood. At times, Guirgis even copies-and-pastes philosophers' arguments into his scenes with a telling lack of subtlety. As the French philosopher Descartes (probably) never said: "Hey, yo, what the fuck, biyatch?"

These fatal flaws are doubly disappointing as you can at times see brief flickers of what Guirgis could have achieved. He does inject a small amount of pathos into his story (he clearly recognises the dramatic potential of Judas' fate, even if he can't live up to it) and the play does improve towards the end: the final scene evokes well the despair of abandonment and the struggle to forgive. The Satan character also has some good lines (of course), particularly his one about HBO on page 97. Most importantly, the dramatic potential and theological dilemmas surrounding the character of Judas Iscariot remain compelling despite Guirgis' ham-fisted contribution to the debate. If people want to explore this Biblical character further, I'd recommend C. K. Stead's excellent 2006 novel My Name Was Judas instead (seriously, it's one of the best books I've ever read). If you want to read a play dealing with powerful theological issues intelligently, I'd suggest Elie Wiesel's 1979 The Trial of God (conspicuously absent of the word 'gangsta'). If you do decide to read The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, I'd advise you to do so with considerably lowered expectations." ( )

This play is hard to figure out. Set up as a trial in Purgatory to try to get Judas out of hell, the author manages to wield with some skill the chief arguments of the educated atheist, while making his judge and counselor for the prosecution quite unlikeable; the prosecutor is a fool who spends his time sucking up. The defense attorney is an attractive young woman who happens to be an agnostic; the judge and the prosecutor spend much of their time in misogynistic commentary (not just flirtation; this moves to the level of outright misogyny). This could be the author putting this language in the mouth of fools; but then later, Satan, who appears to be the character of the highest integrity, tops them all, and the play descends into all the stereotypes of nihilistic atheism, one doesn't know what to make of it. When Jesus shows up, what seemed to be a clever comedy fell apart, as the author apparently could not write Jesus in any way but the most cliched, thereby losing a real opportunity to explore some of the questions he had raised earlier. In the end, it left a sort of a bad taste in my mouth. ( )

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