Elias reviewed The Last Days of Judas Iscariot by Stephen Adly Guirgis
ouch (complimentary)
4 stars
Okay, some of this doesn't age well. But man does it make up for it at the end with the sheer emotional weight of it all.
eBook
English language
Published May 2011 by Farrar Straus and Giroux.
Set in a time-bending, seriocomically imagined world between Heaven and Hell, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot is a philosophical meditation on the conflict between divine mercy and human free will that takes a close look at the eternal damnation of the Bible's most notorious sinner. This latest work from the author of Our Lady of 121st Street "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. [Guirgis brings to the play] a stirring sense of Christian existential pain, which wonders at the paradoxes of faith" (Ben Brantley, The New York Times).
Okay, some of this doesn't age well. But man does it make up for it at the end with the sheer emotional weight of it all.
4.5, rounded down. read in one sitting.