Performed Sep. 29 - Oct. 28 2006
at the Broadway Playhouse in Santa Cruz
"the only person who needs forgiveness is the one who doesn’t deserve it"
Pisces Moon Productions continues its reputation for innovative staging of current and provocative plays with its latest offering, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot by Stephen Adly Guirgis, directed by Susan Myer Silton. In a courtroom in Purgatory where Simon the Zealot is a rapper and the devil wears Gucci, a battle rages over the appeal of Judas Iscariot's sentence of an eternity in hell. As the trial proceeds, we begin to expose the underbelly of an offense that had appeared indefensible. Ultimately, we must face our own culpability, asking ourselves if we can truly forgive and if we’re capable of real compassion.
A New Play
This remarkable play debuted to sold-out houses at LAByrinth Theater in New York in March 2005. Pisces Moon Productions will be among the first companies to perform this new play, which The New York Times says "shares many of the traits that have made Mr. Guirgis a playwright to reckon with in recent years: a fierce and questing mind that refuses to settle for glib answers, a gift for identifying with life's losers and an unforced eloquence that finds the poetry in lowdown street talk . . . Mr. Guirgis is a zealous and empathic researcher, and he presents dilemmas of ancient Galilee in terms winningly accessible to the 21st century"
About the Play
Pisces Moon Productions continues its reputation for innovative staging of current and provocative shows with its latest offering, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot. The action of the play takes place in a present-day courtroom in purgatory, where a passionate public defender is appealing the sentence of Judas Iscariot, who has been condemned to an eternity in hell for the greatest betrayal in Western history. A parade of witnesses takes the stand, and we begin to expose the underbelly of an offense that had appeared indefensible. As each witness reveals his or her complicity - either from greed, hypocrisy, indifference or lust for power - we are forced to face our own culpability.
To emphasize the timelessness of the play's message, a two thousand-year-old story is told with a modern voice, creatively bending time by placing contemporary, recognizable "types," who use current references and poeticized street language, in ancient Galilee. Icons like demons, saints and angels are made empathetic, believable and accessible
