Four people at a train station in the stage adaptation of C.S. Lewis’ “The Great Divorce,” which will be performed at the State Theater in Minneapolis 4 p.m. April 9.
A stage adaption of C.S. Lewis’ “The Great Divorce” to be performed 4 p.m. April 9 in Minneapolis has sparked the interest of University of St. Thomas theology professor Philip Rolnick, who teaches courses on the Anglican apologist’s writings.
“If these guys just let Lewis be Lewis, they will succeed,” Rolnick told The Catholic Spirit.
That seems to be the intent of Max McLean, founder and artistic director of New York City-based Fellowship for Performing Arts, a nonprofit production company dedicated to plays and films that present a Christian worldview. McLean, who attends a Presbyterian church in New York, adapted Lewis’ book to the stage, and FPA bills “The Great Divorce” as a “theatrical joyride filled with C.S. Lewis’ wit and wisdom.”
Philip Rolnick
The play, which is on a national tour and will be performed once in Minneapolis at the State Theatre, centers on four people who are offered a bus trip from hell to the outskirts of paradise and an opportunity to stay, or to return to hell, forever divorced from heaven. The characters are “stuck” in sin, each in their own way, and find the choice more challenging than might be imagined.
Lewis, born in Belfast, Ireland, in 1898, died in 1963 at age 64. He is perhaps best known for “The Chronicles of Narnia,” but his works also include “The Screwtape Letters,” “Mere Christianity” and “The Problem of Pain.” One of his closest friends was J.R.R. Tolkien, a Catholic and author of works including “The Lord of the Rings.”
While a committed member of the Church of England, Lewis studiously avoided Catholic versus Protestant debates, Rolnick said. He sought to write with clarity and wit about the basics of Christianity, such as morality, the natural law (what Lewis called “basic human decency” or the “law of human nature” to emphasize its universality) and Christ’s incarnation, Rolnick said. One noted Lewis scholar, Peter Kreeft of Boston College, has called Lewis the best Catholic theologian of the 20th century, Rolnick said.
A poster for the stage adaption of C.S. Lewis’ “The Great Divorce,” which will be performed at the State Theater in Minneapolis 4 p.m. April 9. COURTESY FPA THEATRE
Lewis breaks ideas down through telling examples, such as drawing the picture of a society so entranced by food that large audiences would pay to watch someone slowly lift the cover off a plate of mutton, or pork chop, and comparing that to what has gone wrong with the sexual instinct of someone who would attend a striptease show, Rolnick said.
His famous “trilemma” in “Mere Christianity,” Rolnick said, argues that Christ is God by noting that a mere moral teacher who said the sorts of things Jesus said would either be a lunatic or the devil. “You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon, or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us,” Lewis argues. “He did not intend to.”
Lewis is a wonderful entry into theology, and college students love him, said Rolnick, who teaches Lewis’ theology and literature at the undergraduate and graduate levels, including at The St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity.
“We (UST) have a plurality of Catholic students and they love Lewis,” Rolnick said. “We have many Protestant students and they love Lewis. And we have some students who are just confused and they end up loving Lewis. He just speaks to people because he’s such a clear writer. There’s so much theology that is unclear. But Lewis, whatever other flaws he may have, lack of clarity is not one.”
A teacher at UST since 2003, Rolnick said he created courses on Lewis beginning about 2010. His own introduction to Lewis came in the late 1990s, on a long plane ride with an elderly couple whose son had died of cancer at age 18.
“It turns out that Lewis’s chapter on ‘Heaven’ in ‘The Problem of Pain’ did more than anything else to get this couple through their pain,” Rolnick said. “A couple months after the initial and only meeting with this couple, copies of Lewis’ books starting showing up in my mailbox. I remain grateful to them for prompting my interest.”
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