By Retta Blaney
A woman in her early 20s came up to Max McLean after a performance of his latest one-man play, “C.S. Lewis Onstage: The Most Reluctant Convert,” and said she could not possibly be a Christian.
Sensing her anxiety, McLean told her, “God has you in his net, and he’s not going to let you go.” Her response surprised him: “What should I do?” He recommended that she read the Gospel of John, and he gave her his card, and they arranged a time to talk further.
Such is the intensity of the story McLean has written. One production took place last spring off-Broadway in New York. “People [make] associations that get in the way, and they can’t get past them. Theater and art have a way of breaking through stigmas,” he said, quoting Lewis’s notion of “stealing past the watchful dragons.”
“His conversion is a roadmap for people who have given up.”
Lewis has been important to McLean’s life since he, too, was in his early 20s. He grew up Roman Catholic in a military family. First Communion and confirmation were meaningful to him, but as a teenager he stopped attending church and “fell into atheism, more by anger than anything else.”
He experimented with Eastern religions in college, in keeping with the trend of the 1970s. Then he met the woman who would become his wife. She took him to church and introduced him to other Christians, one of whom described Jesus as having been a historical person just like George Washington. This triggered in McLean a sense that Jesus was something more than the “fairy-tale character” he had grown up imagining.
The first thing he did was read the Gospel of John. His second choice was Lewis’ “Surprised by Joy,” which he described as “over my head,” followed by “The Screwtape Letters,” which he “got immediately.”
McLean continues to respect the way Lewis opens his readers to the supernatural world, something he thinks the modern church, in its desire to simplify and demystify, misses.
“Lewis is my spiritual guide,” McLean said in a telephone interview. “He helps me understand reality in a way I wouldn’t see or understand. He believed so strongly in how the supernatural world interacts with ours. He triggers my imagination in a way almost no other writer does.”
Deciding to portray that spiritual guide onstage was a natural progression for the actor and playwright. He had previously adapted and performed “The Screwtape Letters” and “The Great Divorce” for the stage. In doing so, he read extensively among works by and about Lewis.
“In 2011, the idea came to me to attempt to tell his own story,” McLean said. He spent two or three months working on a first draft, then put it away for about four years. Then he began working on it through “a hefty development process” that included labs and workshops before the show premiered in April 2016 in Washington, D.C. It then played Chicago and had a brief Midwestern tour before the New York show.
About 90 percent of the 80-minute script consists of Lewis’s words.
“I’m not as smart as he was,” McLean says. “My confidence comes from knowing what an extraordinary writer he was.”
The play, performed without an intermission, is set in Lewis’s study at Magdalen College, Oxford, England, in 1950 and tells the story of his life, from the time of his mother’s death from cancer when he was 10, through his estranged relationship with his father, his fighting in World War I, his avowed atheism and his conversion to Christianity.
“Conversion stories are inherently dramatic,” McLean says. “It’s something you fight against. The tension is almost like an invasion. In Christian language, we’re all rebels. The Incarnation is a kind of invasion, taking back enemy territory.”
He said the play’s title helps attract more than just Lewis fans because it is intriguing. “Convert means to change, and reluctant means to avoid. That was the guiding principle to the piece.” He said he needed to set up why Lewis was an atheist: his mother’s death, his relationship with his father and his being wounded in the war.
“That gave him an extremely pessimistic view of reality. To turn from that was very challenging.” McLean identified the fulcrum of the play as the tension between atheism and theism. “Once I knew how I wanted to go, I knew what to take out and what to put in.”
With the help of a three-piece suit, pipe and a wig of thinning, combed-back hair, McLean transforms into Lewis and tells his story to the audience. In preparation for the “forest of words to navigate,” he listened to three audio clips he found online. In one, Lewis sounds “almost Alfred Hitchcockish.” In the others, he is more relaxed. “He was Irish but he took on an Oxford don pronunciation that was very erudite and educated.”
In preparing for and portraying Lewis, McLean says the “number-one thing” he has learned was about the author’s “generosity of spirit.”
“He was a strange mixture of being incredibly self-reflective and not taking himself too seriously. He had self-deprecating humor. His basic nature was to be very proud and arrogant, and he buried that.
“I feel like I know him. I feel like he’s my buddy. With so many writers, you get to the bottom of them quickly. You don’t get to the bottom of Lewis.”
McLean attributes this to deep insight.
“He read everything from the Greeks to the moderns, and he could remember everything. He was a chronicler of literature who was able to see how the Christian view of the world best absorbed all the worldviews he read.”
Retta Blaney is an award-winning journalist and author of “Working on the Inside: The Spiritual Life Through the Eyes of Actors.”
This story originally was published in The Living Church and is reprinted with permission.
