But comedy often comes from pain and pain in this play is both funny and tragic.
#Trial of judas iscariot show tv#
A lot of the humor in the courtroom part of this play derives from the contrast between Cunningham, who takes this case very seriously, and El-Fayoumy, who treats the courtroom as if it’s the set of his own reality TV show. It offers, not hope, but a cheap and flimsy illusion of it. Like our existing justice system, the court of Hope has long ago failed either as a place where the truth can be established or as a means of dispensing justice. Littlefield is a comic character, and his courtroom is a joke. Guirgis creates situations that are unexpected and absurd his dialogue is irreverent, outrageous, and crackling with ironic anger aimed at a profoundly unjust world. (Please be advised that there are many, many gratuitous F-bombs, and other profanities, in The Last Days of Judas Iscariot.) I have never had to work so hard to keep a straight face on stage. It’s hard to describe this play in a way that conveys how fucking hilarious it is. As Cunningham tells him early on, Judge Littlefield is just as far from God as anyone else in Purgatory. But that’s the only sense in which he can consider himself above it all.
#Trial of judas iscariot show trial#
My character, Judge Littlefield, presides over the trial from atop a ‘bench’ built out of discarded furniture. Interwoven with the courtroom drama is a sequence of monologues by saints and mortals who examine the questions raised by Judas’s last days from a less secular point of view.
Some knew Judas and were deeply involved in the events that led to his death others, from later periods in history, are brought in as expert witnesses. Throughout the play, Judas’s self-appointed defense attorney (Fabiana Aziza Cunningham) and the even more self-appointed attorney for the prosecution (Yusef El-Fayoumy) call a motley crew of witnesses to testify about Judas’s innocence or culpability. Stephen Adly Guirgis’s play is a kind of a modern Biblical seriocomic courtroom drama in which Guirgis imagines a defense attorney appealing Judas’s sentence of eternal damnation at the court of Hope, which is located in downtown Purgatory. Though it happened entirely by accident, it is fitting enough that our refresher rehearsal for The Last Days of Judas Iscariot is taking place in a church on Ash Wednesday. Susan Harris as Judge Littlefield in THE LAST DAYS OF JUDAS ISCARIOT.
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