If it's a trick

Our last play in Religion & Theater (from here on in students work on scenes for a final showing, and a final synthesis paper) was Steven Adly Guirgis' wonderful The Last Trial of Judas Iscariot. It's a very Catholic play in one way - full of saints - but it's also full of questions; the two acts are called "God help my unbelief" and "For God so loved the world" (admittedly in Latin). It's full of religious goodies but also a rollicking good show, full of humor, complex characters and surprise. Maybe because its characters (with names like Saint Monica and Caiaphas the Elder and Mother Theresa and Sigmund Freud) talk like people from a gritty cop show, it managed to charm all the students. Not just those students who are religious or sympathetic to religion, but those who think religion is the enemy of everything precious. I wouldn't have thought it possible. Maybe it's because Guirgis isn't proselytizing but rather showing a living religious world, with all its tensions and tendernesses and open-endedness.

One point on which everyone was pleased to agree - I thought people on all sides would reject it - was a claim which appears in the closing monologue by a heretofore insignificant character, the jailor of Judas Iscariot. Here's part of the monoloque, which tells how he met his wife, recounting their first date:

Two days later, we went out on a date . . . On the way back, I was driving her home, and we passed by this house where my friend Dave Hoghe used to live who had died . . . I hadn't been by his house since he passed. The family didn't live there no more. But when I saw the house, I got struck with this feeling, and I asked her if she wouldn't mind if we just pulled up in front of that house and just sat in the car for a while. She said: "Sure." So I parked, and we just sat in the car or a while. Quiet. Not sayin' nothin'. And before I knew it, Mister Iscariot, I was tearing up - 'cuz this kid, he had been a real good friend of mine, ya know - and then, I just started crying, Mister Iscariot. I couldn't help myself and I couldn't shut it off. And I was real embarrassed, and she just, she just held me while tears and snot and whatnot just poured outta me and onto her little white sweater . . . And she didn't mind about that . . . She didn't mind at all . . . At some point, I drove her home, and we got to her door, and, well, God, it was like, I'll tell ya - it was like peaches and dynamite . . . And before I left, I apologized to her about the crying and all, and she said: "Don't be a jackass, Butch Honeywell," and I smiled, but then I went on to explain my meaning, which was - you know - if you want a girl to think you're sensitive or something, then maybe taking her to the house of your dead friend and crying all over her pretty white sweater might be a good way to pull it off, and, you know what she said, Mister Iscariot? . . . She looked at me for a good long while with them all the way dazzling eyes of hers and then she just said: "Well, if it was a trick . . . then I'm tricked."

"If it was a trick, then I'm tricked" became our mantra, enthusiastically endorsed by skeptics, critics and true believers alike! I guess it captures something elusive but very important about faith which everyone knows but doesn't know how to articulate. (I didn't have time to ask students what the house of the dead friend represented in this entirely secular monologue which, however, recapitulates images and scenes from the religious stories encountered earlier in the play.)