Judas sits motionless behind Plexiglas, underneath a platform that looks like a gallows. Judas (Isaac Benelli, coming off his recent performance in the title role of “The Who’s Tommy”) is penitent or catatonic (you decide) during not only most of the play but also the preceding half-hour as audience members trickle to their seats. Guirgis’ staging concept, abetted here by scenic designer Ron Gasparinetti, is equally imaginative.
And Sigmund Freud (John Baldwin)? Well, sometimes a witness is just a witness. Satan (blond hunk Jeff Clarke) initially seems to be a sweetheart from Sigma Chi. Pontius Pilate (Jake Vincent) is a macho wise guy who invokes the Fifth Amendment repeatedly. Mother Teresa is in good (and bad) company. There’s also an entertaining lineup of characters, starring a sweaty, fidgety prosecutor (John Romano) who flirts most unattractively with the exotic young defense attorney (Alika Ululani Spencer), Judas’ mother (Vera Sloan) and even the star witness, Mother Teresa (Patricia Tyler). Guirgis has certainly provided a lot to work with, including entertaining ideas, and dialogue both urbane and profane. The heavy theology benefits from the usual City Lightness, as director Kit Wilder milks every nuance to keep the play from talking itself to death. Steven Adly Guirgis’ theologically bent 2005 quasi-comedy blends and updates the histrionics of the Scopes “Monkey Trial” with the absurdity of the Marx Brothers to make a potentially boring premise fascinating and relevant, not to mention theatrical. He gets a fair trial, though it resembles a kangaroo court. At the core of “The Last Days of Judas Iscariot” is a straightforward debate: Should the villain who sold out Jesus for 30 pieces of silver be damned to hell forever? In the roundabout form of a courtroom trial, this debate lasts the better part of three hours at City Lights Theater Company, but, heck, Judas has been twisting for two millennia.