C S Lewis comes to the stage, and leads the audience into deep waters.

The Great Divorce between heaven and hell

G. Tracy Mehan III

A few years ago good friends of ours introduced us to the New York-based Fellowship for Performing Arts (FPA), which performedC. S. Lewis’s classic The Screwtape Letters here in Washington. It was a great production, imaginatively staged, but now eclipsed by its recent, outstanding rendition of Lewis’s The Great Divorce.

“Our challenge was to turn a complex theological fantasy into an accessible stage adaptation that entertains and provokes lively discussion,” said FPA founder and Artistic Director Max McLean.

The Great Divorce is based on Lewis’s book of the same name published in 1946 which, as Lewis alludes to in his preface, is a response to William Blake’s Romantic, and revolutionary,The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, composed between 1790 and 1793. This latter work attempted to reconcile heaven and hell in a manner, to put it charitably, that was highly unorthodox, conceiving of them as part of a cosmic unity, or something, in which good and evil are reconciled.

The reader or theater-goer must suspend disbelief, of course, as the story opens with various “ghosts” on a bus from a fairly mild version of hell, one more of loneliness than hellfire (Catholics might perceive it as Purgatory), to another land, not quite Paradise, but a staging area for entry into heaven. These “ghosts” are rather pedestrian folks, mildly irritating and irascible. However, through a number of scenes of witty and, more often, dramatic and compelling dialogues with heavenly beings or “spirits,” and some soliloquies, these same people reveal deep and troubling problems, some petty, some sinful, which keep them from letting go of their egos and embracing the promised land of love and peace.

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