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October 23, 2017

On his first night at Rikers Island, a terrified inmate named Angel Cruz tries to reconstruct the Lord’s Prayer from his broken memories. “Our Father, who art in heaven,” he stammers, “Harold be thy name.”

Aside from that hilarious and heartbreaking first sentence, there’s not much I can quote from Stephen Adly Guirgis’s “Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train,” which opened on Monday in a riveting revival by the Signature Theater. After that line, the play instantly becomes an obscenity oratorio in which vicious, muscular dialogue, appropriate to its setting, turns into gorgeous music.

If it reached no further, the breakneck drama, originally produced by the Labyrinth Theater Company in 2000, would be a worthy enough stunt, a jukebox of Mamet-scaled vulgarity. But when performed, as it is here, by a cast that can recreate its rapture as well as its moral gravity, it achieves the doubleness of great art, burrowing deeper the higher it flies.

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