‘The Great Divorce’ on Stage

I am often asked which of C. S. Lewis’s books is my favorite. My answer is always the same: The Great Divorce. In this most imaginative of books, Lewis works out a grand supposal: what if the sinners in hell were allowed to take a bus ride to heaven? And what if, when they arrived, they were met by a blessed saint (or Spirit) who offered them the chance, even now, to forsake their sin and pride and embrace the mercy of Christ? What would they do? As it turns out, all but one of the damned souls freely choose to return to hell. 

After a few chapters that describe hell and the conversations on the bus ride, The Great Divorce devolves into a series of dialogues (I like to think of them as case studies) between a damned soul and the Spirit sent to help him. As such, the book, though endlessly fascinating, is, like Dante’s Divine Comedy, necessarily episodic: which is to say, it does not provide good raw material for a film or stage play. The kind of narrative thrust and cohesion that one needs for a successful screenplay or script would seem to be lacking in The Great Divorce. At least until now.

Having already given us an effective and unforgettable stage version of another episodic C. S. Lewis book that would seem to defy adaptation (The Screwtape Letters), the Fellowship for Performing Arts, under the charismatic and passionate artistic direction of Max McLean, has brought The Great Divorce to the stage with all its emotional, spiritual, and psychological power intact. Whereas The Screwtape Letters is essentially a one-man show, The Great Divorce makes use of two actors (Tom Beckett and Joel Rainwater) and one actress (Christa Scott-Reed) who, over the course of the play, inhabit some 20 roles—the lightning-fast costume and persona changes left me both dizzy and delighted.

Rather than designate one actor to play Lewis, who, in the book, accompanies the sinners on their bus ride and overhears their conversations, McLean (together with his co-writer, Brian Watkins) has all three of his actors take turns playing the role of spectator. At times, all three do so simultaneously. This clever theatrical device encourages those in the audience to be active spectators and to invest themselves in the various dialogues. We cannot distance ourselves either from the agonizing and tragic choices made by the sinners or from the inability of the Spirits to steer them toward grace. Indeed, we are impelled to identify with saints and sinners alike and to explore our yearning for God as well as our stubborn refusal to let go of the sins that bind us.

Compelling Dance

Under the able direction of Bill Castellino, the actors perform a compelling dance of hope and cynicism, mercy and law, love and bitterness, glory and despair, letting go and grasping on. As they do so, a triple screen projects images of the dreary Grey Town (hell), the phantasmagoric bus ride, and the breathtaking landscapes of heaven, which include green, rolling hills, sublime waterfalls, and majestic mountains. In sharp contrast to the wide range of projected images, the props are kept to the barest minimum.

The play begins and ends in the library of C. S. Lewis, and the projected image of books stacked high on shelves gives way to a series of “stools,” each composed of seven books piled one on top of the other. On the bus, the stools act as seats; in heaven, they serve as stepping stones for the sinners. In keeping with the book, the play presents the damned souls as ghosts who are so insubstantial compared to the reality of heaven that they cannot bend the grass with their feet. Since the absolute “thingness” of the grass hurts them, they are forced to shift from one stone to the next, now sitting, now standing, but never really comfortable. The audience shares their discomfort and wonders along with them whether the promise made by the Spirits—that if they stay in heaven, their feet will adjust to the grass and they will grow more solid—can be trusted.

The sequence of dialogues is so ordered as to offer a well-paced, dual revelation. On the one hand, the audience perceives with growing clarity why the sinners freely reject the offer to stay, despite having seen with their own eyes both the dreariness of hell and the beauty of heaven. On the other hand, Lewis the spectator experiences his own series of “aha” moments concerning the eternal nature of human choice, the difficulties of surrendering pride, self-pity, and pet sins, and his own need for self-reflection and change.

Of the eight case studies around which the narrative is structured, the most moving and convicting concern a controlling wife, a hard-bitten skeptic, a mother who lost her son, and a young man who cannot let go of what appears to be an addiction to pornography. The controlling wife speaks to us in the form of a monologue (she is too self-absorbed to allow the Spirit to say anything), detailing her vigorous, “unselfish” attempts to make something of her lazy, unmotivated husband. As she speaks, we see through her justifications and protestations of injury and grasp what she is unable and unwilling to admit to herself: that she is driven, not by love for her husband, but by an insatiable need to manipulate the lives of others.

The skeptic regales Lewis with his conspiratorial belief that the world is controlled by an unidentified “they” who make promises through their advertising campaigns that they cannot deliver. When Lewis suggests the man might do something about it, he indignantly replies that that is the responsibility of “them.” Lewis comes close to following the man back to the bus, but he is rescued by the Spirit sent to help him, the Scottish writer George MacDonald. MacDonald explains that there is always something the damned prefer to joy and then directs Lewis’s attention to a grieving mother who has come from hell to see her dead child, for she is convinced that she can take better care of him than God can. She repeats over and over again that she believes in a God of Love, but she has confused her suffocating maternal love (her “smother love”) with the true agape love of God. This dialogue is perhaps the most painful one in the play, but it is performed with a bold, compassionate, and almost overwhelming love.

As for the young man suffering from the unseemly and pathetic sin of lust, a sin wholly devoid of the tragic, noble suffering of the grieving mother, he turns out to be the only sinner who accepts the offer of grace. His sin is represented by a red lizard who whispers a steady stream of obscenities in his ear. The Spirit asks the man’s permission to kill the lizard, but the man is terrified that he will be unable to live without it. The internal struggle of the man is difficult to watch, but it builds to a climax that is truly cathartic and leaves the audience with a sense not only of the grip that sin holds on us but of the transforming power of grace.