The Great Divorce on national tour

WORLD readers primarily know Max McLeanfor his starring role in a stage adaption of C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, but his stage adaptation of Lewis’s The Great Divorce is now on national tour. Reviewer Juliana Chan Erikson caught up with it in Washington, D.C.

A patch of astroturf and painted fake bookstacks are humble devices to portray heaven, but as Max McLean’s spare and cerebral rendition of the C.S. Lewis novella shows, the beauty—or the horror—of the afterlife has more to do with the people than the place itself. So although the audience spends most of its time in the clouds, it’s apparent when we meet an artist fretting about being forgotten and a controlling wife who insists on “helping” her husband that these are folks from that other place.

The play faithfully recreates the people, if not the atmosphere, of Lewis’ morality tale about a visit to heaven by tourists from hell. Even those who haven’t read the book—about half the audience in the showing I attended—can easily grasp that, just as hell isn’t a furnace for murderers, heaven isn’t a frolic for do-gooders either.

This is a play to which Christians can bring secular friends without fear they’ll cry “Bible-thumping” and run out of the theater. McLean astutely keeps Jesus behind the curtain, leaving audience members to draw their own conclusions about the characters’ destination—and their own.

“Most people begin the conversation with Jesus too soon,” McLean explained to the audience. “You have to be at odds with the universe. If you bring up the solution without the problem, then you’re using the Name in vain.”

Newcomer Michael Frederic joins Christa Scott-Reed and Joel Rainwater to play all 19 characters in the 90-minute show, and viewers had little trouble keeping angels, ghosts, and narrators straight. Though the play moves quickly, it pauses long enough for meaningful moments to sink in. In one of the most telling scenes, after a grieving mother is denied reunion with her son, she balks: “But I believe in a God of love.” As she leaves, we hear her ironic plea echoing in the theater long after she’s gone.