Stephen Adly Guirgis

From one of our most admired playwrights, "an ambitious, complicated and often laugh-out-loud religious debate" (Toby Zinman, The Philadelphia Inquirer) 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).

A Play

The Last Days of Judas Iscariot

kemi

JUDAS: You got a lot of fuckin’ nerve—

JESUS : —and you’ve got no nerve at all! Where’s your 

 in all this, Judas? You think you were with me for any other reason than that?! It was your heart, Judas. You were 

. You were my heart! Don’t you know that?!

Line

JESUS: —and you’ve got no nerve at all! Where’s your heart in all this, Judas? You think you were with me for any other reason than that?! It was your heart, Judas. You were all heart. You were my heart! Don’t you know that?!

JUDAS: All I know is that you broke me unfixable—and that I’m here … And, you wanna know when you delivered your message differently? At the Temple, Jesus—that’s when. And you were beautiful there. And you left there three inches taller. And we all saw it. I loved you. That’s all I did. And that’s the truth. And now I’m here.

JESUS: Judas—What if I were to tell you that you are not here? That you are with me in my Kingdom even now, and that you have been there since the morning of my Ascension and that you have never left?

JUDAS: Why … didn’t you make me good enough … so that you could’ve loved me?

The Last Days of Judas Iscariot quotes

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