C.S. Lewis Onstage The Most Reluctant Convert
NEW BRUNSWICK/
RUTGERS UNIVERSITY
April 1, 7:30 p.m.
New Brunswick Performing Arts Center
‘Masterful . . . Hugely Moving’
The Washington Post
‘Uncannily Spot-on Performance’
TheaterMania
‘Truly novel’
The Weekly Standard
Continuing its acclaimed 2020 national tour, C.S. Lewis Onstage: The Most Reluctant Convert will stop at Rutgers University in New Brunswick for one performance only on Wednesday, April 1, at the New Brunswick Performing Arts Center. The show stars playwright and award-winning actor Max McLean in the title role and is presented by Fellowship for Performing Arts, producer of The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce and the Off-Broadway premiere of Paradise Lost, among others.
Fifty-seven years after his death, C.S. Lewis’ books are as popular as ever; The Times of London ranked him 11th on their list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945. In his day, his lectures on medieval and Renaissance literature made him the most popular professor at Cambridge and Oxford, where he was on faculty alongside his close friend J.R.R. Tolkien. His children’s series The Chronicles of Narnia has collectively sold 100 million copies in 47 languages and enchanted generations of readers around the world, and his two dozen other books have sold upwards of 100 million copies worldwide.
But Lewis was not always such a vocal and prolific Christian author. His journey from hard-boiled atheism to steadfast Christianity, as brought to life in C.S. Lewis Onstage, was trying and painful. As a child, he lost his mother to cancer, which worsened his strained relationship with his father, and he was extremely clumsy with his hands. He deduced that “the universe in the main was a rather regrettable institution.”
McLean inhabits Lewis from the first tragedy of his young life through a series of transformational experiences that turned him, in his own words, into “the most reluctant convert in all England.” “We know going in how the play ends; the show’s promotion gives it away,” writes John Stoltenberg of DC Metro Theater Arts. “But how the play gets there is the intriguing thing.”
Playwright Max McLean is a Lewis scholar, and his script carries audiences along the journey with Lewis’ signature logic, wit and candor, which TheaterMania says gives “your powers of introspection, logical reasoning, and metaphysical theorizing … a good workout!” He devised the script from Lewis’ writings, including his autobiography Surprised by Joy and his Collected Letters, as well as The Problem of Pain, The Weight of Glory, Mere Christianity, God in the Dock, Present Concerns and Christian Reflections. He was also guided by the writings of Douglas Gresham, Tim Keller and other Lewis authorities.
“The astonishing lucidity of his prose, the open-hearted spirit of his storytelling and the exquisite rigor behind his intellect combined to make C.S. Lewis pretty much every atheist’s favorite Christian thinker … and the favorite Christian thinker of many Christians,” writes Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune.
The Weekly Standard agrees: “C.S. Lewis Onstage delivers something truly novel in modern theater: a story about an immensely creative mind arriving at the threshold of faith … a truthful, richly textured and witty account of religious conversion.”
C.S. Lewis Onstage is set in the Oxford don’s study prior to the publication of his first Narnia story, well before he met his wife, Joy Davidman. (Their relationship is the subject of Shadowlands by William Nicholson, another FPA revival.) From his office, Lewis recounts the waste of life in the trenches of France during World War I, where he concluded that “either there was no god behind the universe, a god who is indifferent to good and evil, or worse, an evil god.”
However, after years of adamant rejection of arguments in favor of Christianity, Lewis came to believe that naturalistic atheism originating solely out of laws of physics and biochemistry could not account for logic and reason. As a 16-year-old, he had picked up a copy of George MacDonald’s Phantastes, which awakened his imagination. In the following years, he avidly read more MacDonald and works by G.K. Chesterton. Influenced by this great literature and respectable Christian friends such as Owen Barfield, Neville Coghill and Tolkien, Lewis determined that moral and aesthetic judgments are valid and meaningful.
This led first to a philosophical theism and then eventually into believing that “God is God,” a tenet similar to that of Judaism. Believing in God forced him to come to terms with the wicked condition of his own heart, which he called “a zoo of lusts, a bedlam of ambitions, a nursery of fears, a harem of fondled hatreds.”
McLean thought that Lewis’ journey to faith would make for an entertaining and surprisingly satisfying experience. “I love this role; it’s a joy to tell Lewis’ story,” he says. “The production has shown a remarkable ability to engage people no matter where they are on their own religious journey.” DC Metro Theater Arts concurs: “Believe it or not, this is one terrific piece of theater. It’s a one-man play about an influential, world-class thinker that’s every bit as smart, fascinating and satisfying as the best such solo performances.” Heidi Weiss of The Chicago Sun-Times adds, C.S. Lewis Onstage is “an exercise in questioning the very essence of what it means to be alive … bristling, provocative, highly entertaining and highly recommended!”
Max McLean is the founder and artistic director of Fellowship for Performing Arts, a New York City-based theatre company producing theatre from a Christian worldview meant to engage diverse audiences in leading performance venues across the country. C.S. Lewis Onstage has reached more than 65,000 theatergoers in Chicago, San Francisco, Boston and the nation’s capital, as well as major campuses from Princeton University to UC Berkeley.
McLean says,
FPA’s conviction is that art and theatre provide an opportunity to engage authentically with the notion of God and the supernatural realm within an imaginative context. In this production we present what we hope is an entertaining theatrical experience in the form of a brilliant young man wrestling with the person of Christ. That is culturally controversial, yet theatre is a great place to wrestle with this subject. For contemporary audiences, figures like C.S. Lewis can provide thoughtful, provocative, multi-layered stories that capture the imagination of diverse audiences.
Max McLean also created the role of Screwtape in FPA’s adaptation of Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters (NYC, London, national tour), and Mark in Mark’s Gospel (Chicago – Jeff Award for Solo Performance). He has brought a production of Genesis from New York on tour across the country. He adapted C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce, The Screwtape Letters, Genesis and Mark’s GospeI. He co-wrote Martin Luther on Trial with playwright Chris Cragin-Day. As an actor, his favorite roles include Stanley in A Streetcar Named Desire and Snoopy in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. McLean has recorded five narrations of the Bible in its entirety, as well as John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress and Classics of the Christian Faith. His narrations have received four Audie Award nominations.
Calendar Listing
What: C.S. Lewis Onstage: The Most Reluctant Convert
Max McLean as C.S. Lewis
Where: New Brunswick Performing Arts Center
11 Livingston Ave., New Brunswick, NJ 08901
When: One performance only! Wednesday, April 1, 7:30 p.m.
Tickets
Prices: $69 general admission.
$6 student tickets and $25 faculty tickets available by phone, at box office, or online.
For student groups of 10 or more, please email Groups@fpatheatre.com.
Note: All tickets are subject to additional processing fees. No refunds or exchanges.
Online: CSLewisOnStage.com
By Phone: 732.745.8000
In Person: Box office at 11 Livingston Ave., New Brunswick, NJ 08901
For high-resolution photography or to request an interview with Max McLean, please contact Cheryl Anteau at Cheryl@SouthsideEntertainment.net 321.747.0077.
C.S. Lewis Onstage: The Most Reluctant Convert
Produced by Fellowship for Performing Arts
Max McLean, Artistic Director
630 9th Avenue, Suite 1409, New York NY 10036
Written and performed by Max McLean
Co-Directed by Ken Denison and Max McLean
Ken Denison, Executive Producer
Kelly James Tighe, Set Design
Michael Bevins, Costume Design
Geoffrey D. Fishburn, Lighting Design
John Gromada, Original Music & Sound Design
Rocco DiSanti, Projection Design
Leah J. Loukas, Wig Design
Tommy Kurzman, Wig Design
Claudia Hill, Voice Coach
Aruba Productions, General Management
