TRIALS

posted by James Reel

    I had a couple of good nights at the theater last weekend, and you can read about them in the latest Tucson Weekly. First, something special for Easter:

    I am happy to report that my expectations had been dashed by the time I staggered out of Stark Naked Productions' three-hour mounting of The Last Days of Judas Iscariot. This is only Stark Naked's second show, I hadn't seen the first, and although I knew producer-director Eugenia Woods to be experienced and sincere, I figured this would be a worthy but not entirely successful effort with a large and therefore necessarily uneven cast. And the play? A trial in Purgatory to decide if Judas really deserves to rot in hell for betraying Jesus and then hanging himself, with witnesses including Satan, Freud and Mother Teresa, plus a cameo by Saint Monica, a jive-talkin' momma whose favorite word is "motherfucker"? Obviously, we were in for an irreligious farce.
    I was wrong, wrong, all wrong. Not about Eugenia Woods being experienced and sincere; that's what enabled her to assemble a strong, well-directed cast and put on a show of very good production values. This is not some well-meaning, amateurish Easter pageant; it's a skilled presentation of a serious play.
    Oh, yes, the script ... I was wrong about that, too. Sure, it has plenty of jokes and funny anachronisms and exaggerated characters--Pontius Pilate is like a gangsta rapper, and Satan, expertly played by Paul Clinco, comes off like an oily Mob nightclub owner. But in The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis asks serious questions about free will and God's forgiveness, and he doesn't foist any easy answers upon us.

    Those rogues at the Rogue Theatre have taken a mildly cynical play by Bertold Brecht and, by stripping away Brecht's contrived happy ending, have solidly affirmed the work's dark view of human nature. And that's all to the good, theatrically speaking, in a play that asks how one can be good in a society that abuses those who try.

RAPID PROGRESS

posted by James Reel

    Well, here’s a fine howdy-do. After arguing for a very long time about whether or not Tucson really needs a big new arena, and then becoming sympathetic to the Tucson Convention Center’s complaint that it can’t accommodate big conferences—sympathy that intensified about a month ago, when the biggest annual conference here bolted for Phoenix—the city council has all of a sudden approved a big new arena and TCC expansion. The trigger was pulled when, less than a week ago, downtown property owner Allan Norville (a longtime thorn in the city government’s side) unveiled his own arena proposal. That got the bureaucrats moving fast, rushing their own proposal before the public perhaps months ahead of schedule. A couple of weeks ago, when I was researching an article on TCC expansion for the Downtown Tucsonan, I asked my various sources if it were true that they were going to put a proposal before the council around the middle of this month (which is the rumor I’d heard). All they’d say is that they’d be going public “by the end of the summer.” Well, they even managed to get it done before the end of spring! Very interesting, what will motivate a bureaucracy.
    Now, of course, that Downtown Tucsonan article of mine is good for background, but it has no worth as a news story.
    Next question: Does earmarking all that money for the arena constitute a slap in the face of those at the University of Arizona who proposed gobbling up almost all the available Tax Increment Financing for a science center on the west side? (For more on that, go here and persevere.)