Freud's Last Session

For Christians visiting New York City and wanting to see a play, my prime recommendation is still The Screwtape Letters, Max McLean's sizzling dramatization of C.S. Lewis' book. But Freud's Last Session, now in a theater next to Central Park, is also worth consideration by lovers of C.S. Lewis and intellectual jousting.

The play imagines a Sept. 3, 1939, meeting between 83-year-old Sigmund Freud and 40-year-old Lewis. Freud has escaped the Nazis, but World War II has just begun and Londoners expect German air raids. The play, inspired by Armand Nicholi Jr.'s 2003 book The Question of God, shows Freud wanting to talk about what he thinks is illusory and Lewis knows is real.

Playwright Mark St. Germain cleverly provides enough tension (radio broadcasts, air raid sirens) and human interest to keep the play from being merely talk, talk, talk. On a beautiful set showing Freud's London office, the prickly, abrupt Freud and the nervous, slightly stiff Lewis (who warms up over the course of the play) try to one-up each other: Freud probes Lewis' relationship with his father and an older woman who mothered him, Lewis pokes at Freud's fears and asks why the atheist fills his study with depictions of gods and goddesses.

Neither debater wins, as the play points out the charm of intellectual repartee but also its inadequacy in changing hearts. In the end, it seems that Lewis believes because God enlarged his heart, and Freud's had room only for himself and his daughter.