performance

the screwtape letters

By Gary Tischler

MAY 2008

Image: Mac McLean as Screwtape & Karen Eleanor Wight as Toadpipe in The Screwtape Letters - photo credit: Gerry Goodstein

The devil is back in Washington.

To some of us who didn’t know he had left, this is news.  Home away from home and all that. But he has indeed returned, at least in the guise of one Screwtape, a senior devil in formal terms, not Satan himself, and the creation of C.S. Lewis, a theologically and spiritually inclined Oxford Don who gave him voice in a classic 1942 work called “The Screwtape Letters”.

The book “is a kind of moral argument,” Max McLean, who stars in the remarkably successful theatrical version of “The Screwtape Letters”, remarked. The show has made its way to the Lansburgh Theater in downtown Washington, only a hop, skip and a jump from the seat of worldly power known as the White House.

“It’s really about whether the devil is real, whether evil is real, but in a subtle and entertaining way,” said McLean, an actor who previously was known for is one-man theater productions on  the Bible, which is a big hit on the college and theater circuit, especially among Christian audiences.  For someone with McLean’s background, it is of course a gentle irony that a show in which he stars as a senior devil has boosted his own name recognition in light speed fashion.

“I think we live in a time where audiences will accept a play like this on a popular basis,” he said. “It was a big hit in New York, first off-off Broadway, then on Broadway. The New York Post and the Wall Street Journal both liked it. The New York Times chose not to review it.”

It doesn’t hurt of course to have the stellar name of C.S. Lewis on the marquee. Lewis, like his Oxford colleague J. R. Tollkien, but for somewhat different reasons, is a big best-selling author once more with the success of the film version of his “The Chronicles of Narnia”, the latest installment of which is one of the big upcoming summer movies.

“Doesn’t hurt,” McLean said. But talk with McLean, a tolerant sort with serious matters on his mind, and you’re apt to get to  talking on matters spiritual, theological, heaven and earth, God and the devil, their existence, and the existence of evil.

In other words, if you’ve ever given even casual thought to such matters, interviewing  McLean isn’t your usual telephone chat.

“Sometimes people don’t see the compatibility with  things spiritual and art, theater and church, that sort of thing,” he said. “I think art is in the service of spirituality. Lewis touched on all the important issues in “Screwtape” but in a vastly entertaining way, just as “Narnia” is entertaining. And when it comes to the Bible, well, there’s a lot of conflict and drama there.

“The Screwtape Letters” conceives of Screwtape, played by McLean, dictating a series of letters to one of his lesser devils, his nephew Wormwood, on how to lead a mortal into temptation and sin, how to get him to forget about God, or as Screwtape calls him “the enemy.”  The object of temptation is called “the client” or  the patient.

“I realize, just as in films, the bad guys are fascinating,” McLean says. “This Screwtape is enormously prideful, egotistical, cruel, but he can also be funny, and he has a way with words.”  What tempter doesn’t?

“Screwtape”, McLean says, “isn’t an obvious monster. He’s more subtle than that. It’s not about getting people to kill, or steal, or rob. It’s about abandoning hope,  being pessimistic, giving in to despair, being self-centered, arrogant and prideful, things like that. But in this case, the “patient” encounters happiness and joy which makes Screwtape nuts.”

McLean, who has received great reviews for his Bible story-telling productions, secured the rights to adapt “The Screwtape Letters” from the Lewis estate and he and Jeffrey Fiske adapted the novel, which exists as a series of devil’s epistles. The production that emerged, with an additional character called Toadpipe, whose job is to react and act out sins, opened at Theatre 315 in New York for a limited three-week run in January of 2006. It actually ran eleven sold-out weeks and then reopened in the Theater at St. Clements in 2007 for another four months.

The play is set in an office in Hell, as opposed to “The Office.” No doubt the production, and Screwtape, will find a comfort zone in Washington, as they did in New York. Fertile ground, fertile ground.

“The Screwtape Letters” will continue at the Lansburgh Theater through May 18.