The Screwtape Letters on Stage: Elegant, Insightful and Soul-Stirring

By José Maria J. Yulo*

Sehnsucht: The C.S. Lewis Journal

Walnut Creek, CA—The French natural-law philosopher Jacques Maritain described the problem of evil thusly:  to deny or ignore a standard of right, creating an absence, and then to act in conformity with this absence.  In this light, or absence thereof, a devil of a play came to town on this quiet, unassuming Thursday night.  The Fellowship for the Performing Arts presentation of C. S. Lewis’s bestselling book The Screwtape Letters began as an off-off-Broadway production in New York.  With its glowing reviews and the masterful performances by leads Max McLean and Karen Wight, it soon moved to sold out stays in both Washington, D.C., and Chicago. 

The Screwtape Letters, as readers of Lewis well know, is a short, but piercingly insightful work on the nature of the temptation toward evil that the author dedicated to his fellow Inkling J. R. R. Tolkien.  It was said that Tolkien himself was concerned with the work, inasmuch as one would have to delve too deeply into the craft of the enemy to author it.  Lewis does indeed delve deeply, and his findings have the habit of surprising the unwary.

McLean, with his rich baritone as His Abysmal Sublimity Screwtape, charms at a distance, with his affected gentility, and scarlet smoking jacket.  At his velveteen feet, and ever ready to draft his master’s correspondence to the unseen nephew Wormwood is the at-times comedic, at others protean demon Toadpipe.  Wight’s extensive training in mime is craftily exhibited in Toadpipe’s episodic transformations into the paragons of vice and virtue Screwtape conjures with a flick of his fingers.  The actors’ combined skill lays in the ability to draw the audience in by the aforementioned distant charm, yet which ultimately leads to a slow revulsion as the characters get closer to the finale.  After all, in hell these demons literally do eat souls, and each other.

Lewis’s message regarding evil however  is one not readily forgotten by this company.  The audience is amused when Screwtape receives a red and black memo from the infernal bureaucracies concerning his revealing to Wormwood that love, excruciatingly exclaimed by McLean, actually does exist, and is the Enemy’s chief weapon for which there is no defense.  Love inevitably produces true pleasure, such as the human “patient” of Wormwood experiences when he takes countryside walks, falls in love and meets a fellowship of Christians.  Screwtape in addition reveals that pleasure itself has heretofore eluded Hell’s most brilliant researchers and their alchemical attempts to produce it.  Therefore, as McLean crescendos his dictation, what Hell must do is to re-direct human longing away from love of God and onto self, spawning the false promise of pleasures that never deliver satisfaction and joy to their seekers.  These false pleasures fail to slake thirst because they point a mortal’s desires inward, ultimately cocooning the individual away from the light of heaven and the fellowship of his own kind.  Thus, as Screwtape exclaims, hellish satisfaction ensues when humans treasure themselves over and to the exclusion of everything, and in the end, attain nothing.

All being said the performance was a welcome success.  It was a stellar occasion to witness an elegant, insightful and soul-stirring production come together with the Bay Area’s own C. S. Lewis Society, an organization that notably preserves and promotes readings and discussions on the Oxford don’s life’s work.  This union of great theater and Lewis aficionados will hopefully extend to future standing ovation performances. 

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