SCOUNDREL TIME.(Romance)(The Last Days of Judas Iscariot)(Theater Review)

History, H. G. Wells once said, is "a race between education and catastrophe." Sometimes--now, for instance--catastrophe appears to be winning, and the contest is almost too unbearable to watch. In such deracinated moments, only a world turned upside down--the world of farce, in other words--works both as an apt metaphor for the caprice of nations and as a release from it. The giddy sophistry of David Mamet's "Romance" (well directed by Neil Pepe, at the Atlantic Theatre Company) is a case in point.

At the beginning of the play, set in a New York City courtroom, a distracted judge (the hilarious Larry Bryggman) tries to focus on the stonewalling tactics of a ...