Monica (“I birthed the mothahf-,” she says in one typical remark, speaking of St. Here, a bureaucratic courtroom is the site of the trial of Judas Iscariot, whose case has been put to appeal by the scrappy, foul-mouthed St. The ultra-cool and increasingly celebrated Guirgis (a longtime member of LAByrinth Theater Company, which is coproducing the show) sets his play in a gritty corner of Purgatory-a spot not unlike the New York he chronicled in Our Lady of 121st Street. Carrière forces us to wonder if we can ever really know the other or understand history-themes eerily relevant to the West’s current conflict with Islam.Ī less focused but even more impassioned arraignment of the universe arrives with The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, probably the most ambitious piece of cosmic mapping to hit the stage since Angels in America. Will the Indians smile at the clown’s cavorting? Will the female Indian protest when the Europeans threaten her child? These sequences are riveting because they put the audience in the same position as the characters, who are searching for revelation in behavior and events. Huntley III) on the terrified Indians, because it’s said that laughter separates humans from beasts. In one particularly unnerving scene, he unleashes a jester (William S. But the production’s most theatrical moments occur when the Legate ferrets for empirical evidence to guide his decision, bringing in natives he’s imported from the Americas. These arguments give The Controversy a satisfying intellectual heft that grounds the meticulous performances-Gerry Bamman’s bursts of sorrowful outrage as Las Casas the chilling serenity of the Pope’s Legate (Josef Sommer), who serves as judge. On the opposing side, philosopher Ginés de Sepúlveda argues that the exploited people are not fully human, and that God is on the side of the Spanish-were it not so, would the natives have succumbed so swiftly to European illness? Christ, he reminds the others, said, “I came not to bring peace, but the sword.”
In a monastery in the Spanish city of Valladolid, three priests and a philosopher meet to resolve a thorny issue: do the native Indians of the Americas have souls, and should they be treated with the same respect as Europeans? Serving as the Indians’ advocate is Bartolomé de Las Casas, a Dominican priest who is aghast at his fellow Spaniards’ slaughter of the natives. Originally written in French by Carrière (author of the legendary stage version of The Mahabharata and numerous screenplays, including the recent Nicole Kidman vehicle Birth), the play has been translated into English by Richard Nelson.īased on a real incident, The Controversy is set in the year 1550, a half-century into the Spanish conquest of the New World. The perturbation is a little easier to define in the case of The Controversy, an ingeniously cynical play that feels timely, despite its costume-drama trappings. Both scripts allude to the Old and New Testaments and the oeuvres of various philosophers both deliberately leave the theatergoer in a place of spiritual discomfort. Carrière’s work (which ran through March 13) concerns a sixteenth-century ecclesiastical argument Guirgis’s (extended through April 3) explores the moral culpability of Jesus’s treacherous disciple. That sounds like a pretty strenuous exercise, and indeed, neither play caters to theatergoers craving light entertainment. Within the space of a week, in February, New York’s Public Theater opened The Controversy of Valladolid, by Jean-Claude Carrière, and The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, by Stephen Adly Guirgis-two noteworthy dramas that use the scenario of a tribunal to probe the mysteries of creation and salvation. But a world away from that media circus, an off-Broadway theater has been giving the concept of courtroom theater a far different and more high-minded spin. Utter the words “theatrical” and “trial” these days, and four-fifths of the populace will think of Michael Jackson.
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