In Purgatory, an attorney attempts to exonerate her client, the man who betrayed Jesus of Nazareth. Better to call this The Trial of Judas Iscariot, but even the name change wouldn’t save this play from its numerous flaws. First, you have to accept that Judas’s real sin was not handing Jesus over to the Romans but his despair that even God can’t forgive betrayal on such operatic scale. And, second, that means the courtroom proceedings are moot; if Judas would only accept Jesus’ saving grace, his despair would disappear. And so would his sin. And everyone could go home. To summarize: Judas is being tried for a crime you may not accept with a verdict that may not matter. Hardly high-stakes drama

Among the witnesses is Mother Teresa, strutting in a vision of the afterlife in which, hey, it turns out the Catholics were more or less right all along. She evokes Thomas Merton on despair twice in succession so that we get the point: “Despair is the absolute extreme of self-love [...] the ultimate development of a pride so great and so stiff-necked that it selects the absolute misery of a damnation rather than accept happiness from the hands of God and thereby acknowledge that He is above us.”

It’s possible, of course, to disagree with such a narrow definition of despair-as-sin and still enjoy the play; not believing in Apollo shouldn’t stop you from loving Oedipus Rex. But writer Stephen Adly Guirgis structures his action around cumbersome monologues. Take Iscariot’s mother’s opening bit. Kristal Greenlea delivers a compelling piece of acting, but she gets little else in the next two-plus hours, and the content of her speech is disconnected from everything else. The entire work is like that, leaving open the possibility that The Last Days will survive into because drama students everywhere will harvest it for the cornucopia of great parts.

Guirgis also commits a litany of smaller sins: a typical Freud caricature; slips like referring to Earth as a “monotheistic society” (it’s not a society, and most of the planet’s societies aren’t anything like monotheistic) and to Einstein as a believer in God (he wasn’t); a self-conscious jumble of street slang and anachronism; a general lack of economy.

Guirgis would be delighted with the Garage’s performance—and so anyone more forgiving of the script than I most certainly will, too, as the cast sell every moment with every bit of their blessèd souls. (Jeff Kriese’s Satan is a particular highlight.) They get the most out of the many jokes in a relatively serious script. They could have done without the piped-in sound, most of it superfluous and, in one instance, downright grating.

But you have to love the Garage, which, as ever, delivers a real theatregoing experience. When you lay your good money down and walk into the intimate Seventh Street space, God damn if you don’t get honest-to-goodness live theater, with all that ought to entail: immersion in a shared experience, dedication to craft, energy to burn, the feeling that you couldn’t be seeing this just anywhere. For that, we can forgive many a transgression.

Tags: Arts, California, last days of judas iscariot, Long Beach, Theater, thomas merton