With a taxing three-hour run time, its potential for poignancy is lost within a lugubrious monologue-to-monologue structure.

However, Last Days, filled with both laugh-out-loud and groan-worthy humor, is an ambitious, tedious and overstuffed ramble littered with propaganda.

First directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman at the Public Theater in 2005, the play is an Artistic Director’s dream come true: A simultaneously incendiary and thought-provoking work that skirts the line of irreverence with boisterous barbs and humor to satisfy the well-read historicist and theologian. The testifying witnesses include fellow apostles, saints, Mother Theresa, Sigmund Freud, Caiaphas the High Priest, Pontius Pilate, Judas’ mother, and of course, Satan. The one being judged in this case is former apostle and betrayer of Jesus, Judas Iscariot. Stephen Adley Guirgis’ The Last Days of Judas Iscariot is a courtroom drama set in Purgatory where the guilty or not guilty verdict literally means heaven or hell for the one standing trial.

THE PLAY ABOUT A TRIAL ULTIMATELY BECOMES A TRIAL TO WATCH

The last trial of judas iscariot