The cast, via
In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevksy has that great and most Russian parable about a very selfish woman who has gone to Hell. Her guardian angel reminds God that she once gave an onion to a beggar in life, and hence God grants her another chance at Heaven. The angel reaches down to Hell with said onion to pull her up to the pearly gates, whereupon a number of other unfortunate souls grab onto her in hopes of being pulled up also. Whereupon she begins to kick them off of her. The onion snaps, and she and the rest of the sinners fall back into Hell.
In a nutshell, that story encompasses most of what C. S. Lewis was getting at in The Great Divorce, one of his characteristically allegorical works of theology. It is the story of a man dreaming of a place known as “the grey town,” which is either purgatory or Hell depending on how long one has been there. He and a number of other hopeful entrants board a bus to the kingdom of Heaven, where they reject their proffered admission in various fashions.
It most closely hews in tale to The Pilgrim’s Progress, but it also bears likenesses to The Canterbury Tales, Plato’s cave metaphor, and T. S. Eliot’s The Rock, with more than a trace of Seussian absurdist overtone. All of this is to say that if a theatergoer were looking for a night of fluff, he’d be better off at Matilda. The Great Divorce is demanding and provoking, and the production currently running at the Pearl Theatre by the Fellowship of the Performing Arts lives up to the challenge put before it.
The production itself is spare. A bare stage covered in fake grass represents the fields of Heaven, and a television screen the width of the stage changes the scenery. Your correspondent wished it had been even more minimal when the narrator boards the flying bus to Heaven and the background becomes a dizzying, constantly roiling night sky.
Things calm down a bit more once we arrive in Heaven, as does the generalized chaos inherent to the grey town. In an effort to demonstrate the unhappiness of the place, there are some strangely abstract, pseudo-art-house scenes with a lot of stylized screaming. The purpose is understood (Hell’s not a fun joint), but the execution is off-putting and instilled the fear that the rest of the production would be similarly affected. It is fortunate that the rest of the production is much more sensible.
There are just three actors in the show: Joel Rainwater, who plays the narrator, and Christa Scott-Reed and Michael Frederic, who play the many other roles with impressive nimbleness. These other roles comprise that of the arrivals from the grey town (called “ghosts”) and their spirit guides to help admit them into Heaven. The narrator watches as the other two perform each story, sort of like individual chapters in an anthology.
There is a man who refuses to go with his guide because he is angry that she, who murdered her husband on earth, was allowed into Heaven before he was. There is a woman who nagged her husband to death’s door and now wishes to do so in the beyond. There is a skeptic who believes Heaven to be nothing more than a glitzy version of Hell, and the sad story of a mother who has let her grief over the death of her son turn her to obsession and anger. They all return whence they came, save for one. It proves to be quite difficult to get into Heaven. As the narrator’s own spirit guide puts it, “There is always something they prefer to joy.”
The actors, happily, do not obscure the wry humor Lewis infused with his philosophy, and there were many laugh-out-loud moments throughout the night. Ms. Scott-Reed and Mr. Frederic’s ability to play these discrete parts with precision and clear transformation from scene to scene is what is most remarkable about this production. Mr. Frederic is fantastically good at the bullies, and as the narrator’s unruffled heavenly escort, the author George Macdonald. And if another actress can match Ms. Scott-Reed’s knack for hysteria and desperation without falling into deep monotony, I have not seen it on the stage. Too many actors have a tendency to take a role to its shrillest peaks with vertiginous speed, but she parcels the beats in each scene with dexterity.
Mr. Rainwater performs the penultimate scene and most well-known chapter, that of a man whose pet lizard, a symbol for addiction, has tied him to purgatory. The spirit guide offers to kill it, but he cannot imagine life without it. His desperation and vacillation escalate. Finally, he allows the spirit to remove it so that he can be free and enter Heaven. (It is apparent why this part is often excerpted and read at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.)
The spirit guides ask their charges tough questions, the toughest of them being “Will you come?.” C. S. Lewis’s original title for the book was Who Goes Home?, which puts one in mind of T. S. Eliot’s line in his poem The Rock: “Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions.” At one point, the narrator’s guide says to him, “Do you understand all this?” to which the narrator dryly answers, “I don’t know about all.” The audience may feel much the same way, yet be edified by the process.
The Fellowship for the Performing Arts has a particular focus on bringing Christian works to the stage, which is, of course, a niche in the theater world, with its easy penchant for demonizing the even-slightly religious. But the Pearl was decently full, and I was impressed with the number of patrons who stayed after for a markedly theological talkback session with the artistic director, Max McLean. The reader may be interested to know that they are putting on The Screwtape Letters with the same company in January, which will likely be another intelligent, stimulating production.