Devil Indemnity Satan gets his day in court and in the classroom in two productions.

"I saw you in that play last week; you made me cry.”

That’s a line, a not particularly consequential bit of dialogue from a sweetly melancholy story told by an otherwise quiet character late in Stephen Adly Guirgis’ The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, and I mention it only because I can’t think of a better response to the Forum Theatre’s dazzling production. So I offer it up, amended a bit, to John Vreeke’s superb ensemble: I saw you in that thrillingly written, urgently performed, crassly funny, somehow heartbreaking play last week, and damn if you didn’t actually make a critic cry.

If you, reader, must know more before you buy your tickets, know that they’re right, those people who describe Judas as a meditation on the eternal tension between divine mercy and human free will. But don’t let that put you off: It’s a smart, funny, passionate meditation on what it takes to forgive—whether you’re human or divine—and how it can sting to be forgiven, whether you’re one of the faithful or an anxious doubter or a confirmed agnostic.

And it’s a lively, cynical contemporary comedy, too, a Boston Legal episode set in purgatory, an unrepentant entertainment and an outrageous bit of seminary-disputation showoffery at the same time. It’s a circus, a show trial presided over by a Southern-fried cracker of a judge, with everybody from Mother Teresa to Mary Magdalene, from Sigmund Freud to the Father of Lies himself called as witnesses for the defense.

And oh, Lord, the writing: Lurid and loopy, elegant and coarse, angrily angular and achingly lyrical by turns, it’s intoxicating, infuriating, electrifying—poetry and profanity at once in the mouths of saints and sinners both. Why are you still sitting there? Go, for Jesus’ sake!

Or if not for his, then for the sake of Patrick Bussink, who plays him with a moving, mournful intensity. And for Jason McCool, whose oft-catatonic Judas inspires sympathy and impatience in equal measures, and whose discipline during those long silent stretches is downright astonishing. For Jesse Terrill’s Freud, all sniff and dignity, and Veronica del Cerro’s Saint Monica, all snap and attitude until a sudden, eye-widening shift into something like street-corner grandeur.

Go for Julie Garner’s all-but-broken defense attorney, for Scott McCormick’s cheerfully smarmy prosecutor; go for Brian Hemmingsen’s bellowing dead Confederate of a judge (trapped in purgatory since he hanged himself on the day of Lee’s surrender) and for his simmering, righteous Caiaphas, called to account for suborning Judas’ treason and for sending Jesus off to crucifixion.

Go for Frank Britton’s eye-opening Pilate, a hard case with something unmistakably honorable at his core, and for Maggie Glauber’s mildly peevish Mother Teresa, quoting Thomas Merton on what turns out to be the crucial subject of despair. Go for St. Thomas, for the hapless bailiff, for the exquisite lighting and the insinuating sound. And go—go on, go now—for the fabulously seductive Satan of Jim Jorgensen, who’s at his smartest and subtlest in that slick white suit, and for the quiet, unassuming depth in Frank B. Moorman’s juror.

He’s the otherwise unimportant character I mentioned at the outset, the guy telling the story that seems like nothing and turns out to be all about the oft-unconsidered cost of betrayal—the excruciating pain of the betrayer who knows himself, who sees how far he’s fallen, and who despises himself too much to reach for the hand offered in forgiveness. Despair, tied up with pride, before and after the fall—it’s at the intensely human heart of Guirgis’ divine comedy, and you needn’t count yourself among the faithful to be rocked by the scope of the tragedy the playwright immures his Judas inescapably in: If you’ve ever lived to regret disappointing someone, you’ll know it chapter and verse.

There’s wit and passion and conviction in The Screwtape Letters, too—the material, in which one of hell’s senior bureaucrats counsels a hapless underling in the finer arts of human temptation, comes courtesy of C.S. Lewis, after all, but the stagy almost-solo show running downtown at the Lansburgh doesn’t spark to life quite the way Judas does. Intelligently designed it certainly is, and handsomely produced (love the raked triangular island from which the titular demon dispatches his epistolary advice), but the conceit will strike many as a bit too page-bound to work on the stage.

Not everyone, of course; there are those who think that Lewis’ mischievous, upside-down arguments (the Letters are in fact a carefully built Christian apologia, of course) were meant to be read aloud, “preferably with lip-smacking relish,” as Terry Teachout put it in enthusiastically recommending a 2006 off-Broadway production. That staging was built, like this one, around the sulfurously ripe performance of Max McLean, who’s still smacking his lips greedily over Lewis’ juicy rhetorical morsels. If he’s gnawing occasionally on Cameron Anderson’s well-furnished boneyard of a set, too—well, it’s a showcase of a part, no?

Apparently the evening’s other character has been reconceived a bit: In New York, the secretary-demoness to whom Screwtape dictates his increasingly irate missives apparently wore red fishnets and did a bit of interpretive dancing between letters. Here she’s a kind of grim Cirque du Soleil reject, a hissing, snarling, bone-nibbling thing who undulates around in a feathered-and-finned leotard when she’s not morphing into one or another of the humans Screwtape describes so derisively. (None of the above, by the way, is meant as a knock on the agile Karen Eleanor Wight, whose wordlessly expressive performance is as compelling as anything else on stage.)

It’s just that wit or no wit, insight or no insight, the novelty of Lewis’ conceit wears off after a bit, and that once McLean has plumbed this vocal register and that, tried one physical attitude and another, there’s not much in the way of character-defining content (to say nothing of actual dramatic conflict) to keep an audience tuned in. Which means that in this 90-minute sermon, most of the congregation will spend the final 15 minutes or so longing for the sound of the recessional.