Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis has revoked the rights to the Shelton Theater’s production of his “The Last Days of Judas Iscariot,” citing the show’s script cuts, which violate federal copyright law, as well as the theater’s response after he found out about the cuts.

The drama, produced by and starring Matt Shelton and directed by Richard Ciccarone, was scheduled to run through Saturday, Aug. 12, at the 74-seat Union Square venue, one of two spaces the Shelton operates at 533 Sutter. The Shelton cut a script that runs two to three hours down to 80 minutes, pared the cast down to nine actors (the Public Theater’s 2005 premiere used 15; a La MaMa production in New York this year used 29) and also moved a monologue. After Guirgis issued a cease and desist order Saturday, Aug. 5, the show’s four remaining performances were canceled. (This story was originally reported by Arts Integrity Initiative.)

Writing on his Facebook page, Guirgis says he found out about unauthorized changes to the text from his licensing house, Dramatists Play Service. Though he would have been fully within his rights to shut the play down immediately, he initially chose to allow the show to continue, provided the theater add “large visible inserts” to their programs, according to a letter he sent Shelton and Ciccarone on Aug. 1, which he later shared on Facebook. (Guirgis could not be reached in time for comment.) Those inserts were to read, “The play you are seeing tonight has been improperly and extensively cut & edited. These edits and cuts were made without permission, against the wishes of the playwright, and in violation of Federal Copyright Law.”

The letter continues: “Put in the inserts. Or close the play. Your choice.”

When Aren Haun and his wife, Sheila, went to the show on Thursday, Aug. 3, they saw that note in the program with the word “Warning,” in red capital letters, underlaying Guirgis’ text. “My wife and I almost left before the show,” Haun says over the phone. But they didn’t, partly because they knew one of the actors in the cast.

The next morning, Haun, who’s also a playwright, posted photographs of the program to a playwrights group on Facebook. “It seemed so absurd, it seemed so extreme, that someone needed to say something about it,” he says.

Commenting on Haun’s post, Guirgis wrote, “now i see they put a stupid WARNING thing over the statement i asked them include — and it looks more like marketing (oh, warning! something “taboo”) — rather than an admission of fault on their part.”

After Shelton didn’t immediately respond and apologize, Guirgis revoked the rights.

In an interview at the Hotel Rex across from the theater on Tuesday, Aug. 8, Shelton, who says he doesn’t use Facebook, seemed shell-shocked by both the chain of events and the social media backlash it spawned.

“When I read (the play), I saw something beautiful in it that spoke to me,” he says, in the story of an imagined trial for the disciple Judas Iscariot, and particularly in the question, “Can we forgive ourselves?” (The irony is not lost on Shelton that this whole debacle unfolded around a play about a character famous for betrayal, especially since Shelton played the part of Satan in the show.)

“I thought it would be a great piece to do, and I was excited to do it, and I made the horrible mistake of not asking permission to adapt it freely,” he says. “That was foolish on my part, and I’m deeply sorry that I hurt (Guirgis) and I hurt others, including my cast. They got roasted on Facebook unfairly. It was totally my decision.” Shelton says that although Ciccarone decided which cuts to make, “I was the one who asked him to.” As for the addition of the “warning” label, Shelton says he never intended to mock Guirgis; that was an effort to set off the insert as a “special thing,” an effort he now describes as “dumb, a miscommunication.”

From when he first read the play, Shelton knew he would need to truncate it to produce it, not because of timing constraints, even though the Shelton often performs two shows per night in its venues. (A typical bill features play first and then improv or comedy as a late show.) But he’s produced the lengthy “A Streetcar Named Desire” before, making that work by starting at 7 p.m. The main issue with “Judas Iscariot” was cast size.

Shelton, who’s part of a longtime Bay Area theater family — he’s the son of renowned acting teacher Jean Shelton — knew he was violating copyright law; he’s been at the Shelton’s helm since 1993. “I didn’t reach out to the writer” — to ask for permission to make changes — “because I didn’t have the status. I was afraid of his status.”

He went ahead anyway. “I thought I was so under the radar, so basement theater. As some of my colleagues have mentioned, ‘Hey, you’re no longer just hidden. You’re a known theater.’ I never saw it that way. I’m still down there taking out the trash, doing the sets, I acted in the show — I’m doing everything.”

Shelton says that he and Guirgis resolved the matter amicably. Still, “it was painful to be humiliated publicly and really viciously,” he continues. “It’s like, I worked for 25 years in a basement. I’m still there. I dedicated my life to it, to telling stories, to helping others tell stories. ... And if the theater community is throwing stones at each other, we’re deep, deep in a bad way. With the state of the world, where we are, we need to be helping each other, lifting each other up.”

Of course, playwrights, no matter how widely known they are, are vulnerable, too: to having their creative vision and their legal rights violated. That, for Shelton, was the lesson. “I didn’t get that. I didn’t understand that fully,” he says.

Lily Janiak is The San Francisco Chronicle’s theater critic. Email: ljaniak@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @LilyJaniak