The trial of judas iscariot
The ache we are meant to feel for Judas in his isolation never comes. Judas, actually, is not a giant role, but it is a crucial one, too blandly played here by Gabriel Furman. Gantt restarted afterward even better than before. On Saturday night, the performance had to stop in the middle of Pilate’s scene because an audience member needed medical attention. But LeLand Gantt makes Pilate his own: a dapper snake of a man with patience worn thin. When Philip Seymour Hoffman directed this play’s original production in 2005, for Labyrinth Theater Company, Stephen McKinley Henderson played Pontius Pilate, and I still hear his voice in the lines. Guirgis’s later plays - like “The _ With the Hat” and “Between Riverside and Crazy,” which won the Pulitzer Prize - “Judas Iscariot” addresses spirituality more cerebrally than the earlier works that made his reputation. Gabe Fazio’s Simon the Zealot is one of these, occupying the witness stand with such intensity and stillness that the whole room shrinks to his little part of it.įull of the perfectly pitched contemporary urban vernacular that’s a hallmark of Mr. It’s interesting, though, to see how the audience and the other actors snap to attention in the presence of a vividly inhabited character. The sparely designed production doesn’t hang together the way it might, either, and individual performances often don’t dig far beneath the surface. Parsons’s slow-paced revival - developed at the Actors Studio as part of its Theater & Social Justice program, and staged with a cast of more than two dozen - never conveys the pain that’s at the center of the play: the deep purple bruise of a troubled soul who will not heal. It’s about the kind of guilt, self-loathing and entrenched despair that can create a permanent personal hell, a form of solitary confinement where the prisoner is insensible to love. The framework is Roman Catholic, but it’s not really a play about religion. Guirgis, whose vastly compassionate, darkly comic play cross-examines the Gospels, posing complex moral and spiritual questions about divine justice and human failures of virtue.