So does Mother Teresa (she’s funny, too).

El-Fajita.” El-Fayoumy butters up the judge and blurts inane objections this buffoon is the play’s comic fail-safe, and Scott McCormick nails punch line after punch line. Vaudeville hijinks abound: The judge keeps referring to the clownish prosecuting attorney, Yusef El-Fayoumy, as “Mr. The trial is inevitable, though, and it’s a wild one. The blowhard Southern judge - a character that would seem doomed for the rocks of cliche, yet which thrives in Brian Hemmingsen’s drawling comic turn - wants none of it. Cunningham, played with salty assurance by Julie Garner, demands that Judas’s appeal be heard by this purgatorial kangaroo court. More sympathy for the damned arrives in the form of a defense lawyer zestfully named Fabiana Aziza Cunningham, an aggressive figure in a black dress and strappy heels. The play opens with a quiet, piercing monologue from Judas’s mother (Annie Houston), and her pain commands respect. (The runaway success of “ Book of Mormon” suggests we’re fine with that.) Guirgis’s style is unabashedly in-your-face and sometimes slapstick silly, yet he establishes his startlingly deep earnestness right at the top.

If three hours of Bible analysis as rehashed in the language of gangsters isn’t your thing, so be it. Good news: The muscle memory is intact, and the show remains a blustery dazzler. Now Forum and director John Vreeke are getting the band back together for a remount - let’s not call it a resurrection - in the more spacious Round House Silver Spring theater, next to the AFI movie complex. The scrappy Forum Theatre made an exhilarating show of Stephen Adly Guirgis’s sprawling drama six years ago at the H Street Playhouse, which has since been abandoned for redevelopment. It’s a holy courtroom drama and a brazenly irreverent farce, set in Purgatory and animated by slangy, gritty, foul-mouthed characters who somehow insist on keeping the stakes very real. “The Last Days of Judas Iscariot” is a splendid storm of a play, a full three hours examining the proper fate of the man who betrayed Jesus and, by conspicuous extension, the fate of unforgiven souls everywhere.

Trial of judas iscariot show