Playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis has been represented in Buffalo by his play Jesus Hopped the A Train, while Off-Broadway he has been represented by Buffalo actors Jeffrey DeMunn and Stephen McKinley Henderson, who appeared as the judge and Pontius Pilate in The Last Days of Judas Iscariot. Road Less Traveled, which continues to forge connections to the New York theater, has reached out to Guirgis to produce the Buffalo premiere of this play that imagines a court trial over the fate of the biblical Judas Iscariot, using flashbacks to his childhood and testimony from witnesses that range from Satan to Sigmund Freud, to Mother Teresa, to Judas’ mother.

The production was supposed to have featured Stephen McKinley Henderson, recreating his off-Broadway performance, but as Henderson so frequently does, he landed another commitment.

In the meanwhile, Guirgis, who continues his obsession with justice and moral relativism has just opened his newest play on Broadway, The Motherfucker with the Hat, starring Chris Rock in his Broadway debut with Bobby Cannavale as a guy who goes berserk when he finds a man’s hat in his girlfriend’s apartment and realizes that it’s not his. The new play was glowingly received by the New York Times, despite the inability of that paper to print its title!

At Road Less Traveled, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot has been directed by Scott Behrend, and stars Lisa Vitrano, Brian Riggs, Jay Pichardo, David Oliver, Jim Maloy, Rolando Gomez, Philip Davis, David Hayes, Adrienne Lewis, Victoria Perez, Kristen Tripp Kelley, Verneice Turner, and Barry Williams. The production runs through May 22 at Road Less Traveled Theater, Market Arcade Film & Arts Centre (639 Main Street, 1-800-745-3000).