Ernest Hemingway’s little-known play Today is Friday, originally published in the collection Men Without Women, is a haunting depiction of Christ’s crucifixion. The story begins in archetypal Hemingway fashion. The crucifixion itself has already happened off-stage. Three men enter a drinking-place at eleven o’clock at night and begin to talk liquor. “You tried the red?” the first man asks. “No, I ain’t tried it,” the second says. They attempt to lose themselves in drink, but the third man has a “gut-ache,” and though the Hebrew wine-seller tries to “fix him up” with some concoction that tastes like “camel chips,” it soon becomes evident that his malady is not merely physiological or psychological.
“He was pretty good in there today,” the first man contends. He could be describing a superior matador or a heavyweight champion. But these are not the mob men of The Killers or the bull-fighting aficionados of The Undefeated. Rather, these three men are Roman soldiers, and we soon recognize them as those who crucified Christ. “Why didn’t he come down off the cross?” the second soldier asks, unwittingly betraying his sense of Christ’s singularity—his sense that Christ could have descended. “He didn’t want to come down off the cross. That’s not his play,” the first suggests. “Show me a guy that doesn’t want to come down off the cross,” says the second soldier. Only the third soldier identifies with the crucified, admitting his reluctance to “nail . . . them on,” and repeatedly confessing that he feels “like hell.”
