Stephen Adly Guirgis, the celebrated playwright, screenwriter, and actor, writes works that ask a lot of audiences, but give a lot back too. His 2005 play, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, runs close to three hours and features a cast of fifteen playing a variety of historical, religious, and biblical roles. It takes as its main premise the trial of the betraying apostle Judas in purgatory, with a judge residing over a noisy, at times chaotic courtroom populated with saints, psychiatrists, and even Satan. But as Canadian actor-director Ted Dykstra explains, the piece is about “being able to forgive yourself.”

Toronto was first introduced to The Last Days of Judas Iscariot in 2005; it won huge acclaim and went on to win five Dora (Toronto theatre) awards. Birdland Theatre has re-mounted the work for a brief run at the Fermenting Cellar in Toronto’s historic Distillery District. It runs until April 15th.

Dykstra, who audiences in Toronto and Edmonton may remember from his turn last spring in the musical Fire, plays the dual roles of Judge Littlefield and Caiaphas the Elder, the rabbi who sent Jesus to Pontius Pilate. He sees a much deeper resonance to Guirgis’ work that reaches far past its immediate religious references.

“As we speak, there are people who can’t forgive themselves, or ask for the light to come into their hearts, and that is a very religious concept completely f***ed over by organized religion and the people who wrote and rewrote the bible,” he says passionately. “For the Catholic Church to say Judas cannot be forgive is ridiculous –it’s anti-Christian. He did the world a favour, if you want to take story at face value: Jesus had to be sacrificed. If he hadn’t done that, arguably there would be no heaven.”

The play, which takes the form of a courtroom drama with various historical asides and shifts in time and place, is lengthy, and verbose, certainly, but it also has deep relevance to the times. When it was written, the Bush administration was in power and the play was seen as a timely criticism of its policies; now, with the world economic crisis, and many caught in their own purgatories, the work has taken on a different kind of importance, one no less potent or recognizable.

“It’s a very challenging piece of work,” Dykstra explains. “It’s also an allegory of the US justice system, 9-11 and everything else. I look at it like a Supreme Court judge, in a system that is not fair and I know it’s not fair. No matter how hard you fight this kind of evil, you won’t win by playing fair.”

Dykstra isn’t the only prominent Canadian performing. He’s joined by an impressive who’s who of Canadian theatre. Richard Greenblatt, Dykstra’s partner in the monster-hit Two Pianos, Four Hands, plays Saint Thomas (so-called “Doubting Thomas”) as well as Sigmund Freud. Acclaimed director-playwright Morris Panych plays El-Fayoumy, purgatory’s lugubrious prosecution lawyer, Obsidian Theatre’s Artistic Director Philip Akin plays Pontius Pilate, and Soulpepper stalwart Diego Matamoros plays Satan.

Musical actor Adam Brazier, whom Toronto audiences may remember from his turn as Sky in Mamma Mia, plays Saint Peter as well as with Butch Honeywell, the jury foreman who delivers a moving final monologue that closes the play. Like Dykstra, Brazier says Guirgis’ work has a wider resonance than its immediate religious placement.

“(He) is not only putting Judas on trial, he’s putting history on trial,” says Brazier. “He’s using prevailing themes, one being that history is a lie agreed upon, and you have to question it. You have to. I sympathize with Judas a great deal. If I’m going to break down the scripture and the gospels, then what I come away with is, Judas did what he had to do. The story would not have been complete (otherwise). His function is as relevant and important as Jesus’ –they’re one in the same. He’s like, ‘if you’re gone, what have I got left?’ It’s like Batman and the Joker.”

Dykstra echoes the same sentiment about the symbiotic relationship of dark and light, good and evil. “It’s amazing, how deeply they run in every story,” he notes, “and it’s the same with Judas and Jesus. You have to have the two pulling at each other: sperm and egg, creation and destruction, black and white. It’s DNA, one and zero. You can’t have one without the other –the duality, not the mono, but the duality is what God is. It takes two things to make an explosion.”

Part of this duality is manifest through the ways in which women are portrayed in Gurguis’ world. Saint Monica is given a rapper-esque, homegirl dialogue, Mother Theresa is a mix of caustic and sarcastic (and shown as taking money from less than saintly sources), and the fictional defence lawyer, Fabiana Cunningham, is a mix of sexy-strong Katherine Hepburn and helpless victim. The sharp lines Guirgis portrays between the genders, even in purgatory, is something director David Ferry feels is entirely in keeping with the themes of the play.

“The construct this play deals with was part of a movement in world religions that took away spirituality from women,” the award-winning actor-director says pointedly, “it took away the matriarchal structure. It turned it into a patriarchal structure, so women became things of dirt, not to be trusted. When Caiaphas is on the stand, and Cunningham is cross-examining him, he refuses to look her in the eyes, because she is ‘an unclean thing,’ and he can’t be near unclean things. That’s the world that puts Judas in the ninth circle of hell, and it’s a world that has also turned women into less than equal participants in the world, so it’s interesting that Purgatory creates for itself a dualistic world in which women are in their own way outcasts, as Judas is an outcast. In a sense, Judas in the feminine principle, and he is the other half of Jesus.”

Zorana Kydd, Birdland Theatre’s Artistic Producer, and who also appears in the play as Mary Magdalene, says producing a show of such ambition “is a really huge undertaking, especially for an independent company... of course, there are fears and insecurities, but that’s just the process. There are no guarantees in art, and it’s tough in that way but it’s what we do.”

When it comes to any differences between this production and the last one four years ago, Kydd notes there isn’t that big a change, but having had the work be part of her everyday existence for so long has meant she knows the entire text by heart now. “Every word, and I love it. I’m hearing it everyday and I still love it.”