I Spent Three Months with Judas Iscariot
And now I really miss him
The play “The Last Days of Judas Iscariot” by Stephen Adly Guirgis is a favorite of college campuses. It is a well written piece with powerful themes. It has six leads and ten supporting characters to give a lot of aspiring actors the chance to tread the boards. The recent performance at San Francisco State University was a success with full houses and strong performances by young and talented students. It was also my acting debut.
A quick look at the cast photo brings to mind the Sesame Street classic, “One of These Things is Not Like the Others”. I’m sure most people seeing the image for the first time wonder how that grey-haired old dude in the back ended up in the performance. If you are wondering too, here’s the answer. I retired from a long corporate career to pursue an interest in creative writing. My efforts in prose up until then were enough to get me into an MFA Program. I knew it was going to be an uphill climb. I had no academic background in one of my areas of interest, playwriting, so in addition to my creative writing classes, my first semester I enrolled in an upper-division undergraduate class in the history of global theatre. That class was offered by the Theatre Arts department, and it had a great professor who was directing the Spring 2025 play. She encouraged everyone to read the script and audition, even if you were not in the acting track. I don’t consider myself impulsive, but every now and then I take a chance on something that may not have stood up to even a few minutes of objective scrutiny. I read the play, noticed that one of the leads was a role for a grumpy old white man to play Judge Littlefield and thought, that’s not a big reach. The director agreed.
Early on in rehearsal I realized I was so far out of my depth that the shore was no longer visible. The Arts were not a big feature at my blue-collar Christian Brother’s school in Australia in the 1970s. The closest I got to a high-school theatre was being in the choir when we performed a couple of numbers from Joseph’s Multicolored Dreamcoat. When the assistant director got us in a circle to warm up with a quick round of Zip, Zap, Zop, he may as well have been asking me to rapid-fire explain quantum mechanics in Sanskrit. That was the day that I realized that while I may have no fucking idea what I was doing, the people around me absolutely did. These individuals who were more than young enough to be my kids were at home in this environment. I came back to school to learn new things, and whether they knew it or not, all of these people were going to be my teachers.
Forcing myself to shut-up, listen and learn was damn hard. I am a self-confessed control freak. If something is broken I want to fix it. If something is wrong I want to correct it. I spent many years as a corporate manager, and I was used to being the one guiding the activities of others. When it came to this play I spotted typos in the script, and I wanted to point them out. I thought I knew how every word of dialogue should be pronounced including the names of celebrities from recent history. In short, because there were so many things that I didn’t understand about being in a play, I wanted to chime in on everything that I thought I did. The other actors were very gentle and patient about my inept attempts to “help”. It took me a little while to figure it out, but eventually I understood that I wasn’t the damn director. My job was to understand my character, memorize my lines, and learn how to act. A workload that I found enormous in its own right. My experience in the corporate world led me to believe that anyone you barely know who wants to be your friend is trying to sell you something or trying to knife you in the back, or both. There are exceptions, but not many. It took me a few weeks to understand that my fellow cast members genuinely cared about everyone in the production, including the old fart who had not been in a single acting class with any of them.
So many things in this process absolutely terrified me. Was I able to memorize around two hundred lines? Could I convincingly portray a Confederate officer sitting in a dingy corner of Purgatory, passing judgement on those who were appealing eternal damnation? I was cocky about my ability to speak in public under stressful situations, but would being on a stage be different? Spoiler alert, it was. It seemed the process had no end of surprises. I’d develop some level of confidence and then boom, let’s move from the rehearsal space to the real stage. Now let’s rehearse in costume. Now act with lights in your face and coordinate your swing of the gavel with the sound operator. Every step threw me, made me stumble over my lines, and made me wonder why the fuck I thought I could do this.
And that was just the things that were specific to this play. I had thought long and hard about the decision to be a student again at the age of sixty-one. SFSU has a great Creative Writing program, not only because of the faculty but also due to the diverse backgrounds and experience of the students. I worried I was going to end up being perceived as the sad old CIS white male obliviously spewing microaggressions with every sentence. There is enough age and experience diversity in the MFA writing program that those fears subsided, but they reared their head again when I looked at my fellow actors. On multiple levels I was on guard and stressed about fucking up. If there had been understudies I am not sure I would have made the distance.
There were so many straws sitting on this camel’s back that the addition of one more would have done me in. But that was when the people involved in this play made the difference and turned it all around. The director, the crew and particularly the cast all treated me as one more member of the production. When I asked for help and advice it was freely given. Mistakes were ignored; improvement was celebrated. The help never stopped. Guidance was there on how to deal with opening night jitters; on understanding that some audiences are great, some are flat, and that’s just the way it goes. There have been a few other times in my life when I have felt that welcomed and that supported, but not many.
And now an incredible first-time experience is over. I’ve gone back to writing. The rest of the cast are back to their other subjects, part-time jobs, and multi-player online games that I recognize but don’t understand. I was warned by seasoned performers that there would be “post show blues” but I was surprised by the intensity. If it is kind of creepy that an old guy is talking about developing an emotional connection with a bunch of undergraduates, then so be it. And if this piece of non-fiction prose reads like a syrupy love letter to the SFSU cast of the Last Days of Judas Iscariot, then fuck it, I guess it is.
