The Screwtape Letters, in a touring revival at the Lansburgh Theatre, is a polished, imaginative rendering of a tedious, self-righteous play. The acting and production values in this two-hander are excellent, but the script is a smug harangue. The play is adapted by Max McLean and Jeffrey Fiske from C.S. Lewis’s much-beloved epistolary novel, a […]
Martin Luther on Trial from FPA (review)
The staging is impeccable, the acting is first-rate, the script is amusing and, to the extent you can say this about a play which has Hitler, Freud, Lucifer and Pope Francis talking to each other, historically accurate. Then why did I walk out of Martin Luther on Trial so dissatisfied? In the end, it may […]
Max McLean in C.S. Lewis Onstage: The Most Reluctant Convert (review)
The disciple Paul converted to Christianity after being knocked off his horse by a shaft of light, and hearing a voice say, “Saul, why dost thou persecute Me?” The conversion of Clive Staples “Jack” Lewis took longer, and was a little quieter. “When we [his brother Warnie and himself] set out [by motorcycle to the […]
C. S. Lewis adaptation,The Great Divorce, is at times surpassingly funny
The Great Divorce is a story about the bus ride from Hell – literally: the Redemption Express from the bad section (there is no good section) of “the gray town” to the verdant fields of the much larger and denser Heaven. Like Sartre and Camus and also like Dante Alighieri, whose work this recalls, C.S. […]