Max McLean gives the Devil his due in this adaptation of C.S. Lewis novella
‘The Screwtape Letters’
Where: The Lansburgh Theatre, 450 Seventh St. NW
When: Through Jan. 3
Info: $29 to $60; 202-547-1122; shakespearetheatre.org; approximately 90 minutes, performed without intermission
Actor and dramatist Max McLean was thinking hard about hubris versus humility even before he had a hit show on his hands.
“According to [C.S.] Lewis — and he gets most of his ideas from John Milton — pride is the first sin, the real sin,” McLean said. “All other sins are byproducts of that.”
The star of “The Screwtape Letters” — a wickedly seductive adaptation of Lewis’ 1942 novella about a senior demon in Hell advising an apprentice demon on Earth as he tries to effect a man’s damnation — has reason to be cautious. His show, which is of course about the very process by which a man may be corrupted, is enjoying boffo success. It begins a return engagement at the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Lansburgh Theatre tonight.
Since it last played that venue in the spring of 2008, “Screwtape” has toured from San Francisco to Phoenix to Fort Lauderdale, Fla. In Chicago, it filled the Mercury Theatre for six months — four times as long as initially booked.
“Screwtape has been very good to us,” McLean, reached by phone last week, allowed. McLean is artistic director of the Morristown, N.J.-based Fellowship for the Performing Arts, a theater company devoted to works with a Christian worldview — i.e., ones that don’t often catch fire with secular audiences the way “Screwtape” has. Among the one-man shows he’d tackled previously was “Mark’s Gospel,” a retelling of the Book of Genesis from the creation through the sacrifice of Isaac.
It was that show that prompted “Screwtape” director and co-writer Jeffrey Fiske to contact him with the idea of bringing Lewis’ epistolic classic to the stage. The pair debuted their first version of the show at New York’s Theatre 315 in January 2006. Slated for three weeks, it ran for 10. But McLean knew it could be better.
“Frankly, it wasn’t that good,” McLean recalled. “We were too enamored with too much of it.”
After that production closed, McLean and Fiske spent a year and half tightening the script, commissioning a new design team and recasting the role of Screwtape’s beastly assistant, Toadpipe, the only other character who appears onstage.
Their most daunting task? Editing C.S. Lewis.
Some tweaks were obvious: References to war with Germany were updated to address the war on terror. Much riskier was the job of streamlining Lewis’ verbiage without compromising its depth or elegance. “We had to take Lewis’s 60-word sentences and make them 18-word sentences,” McLean explained. “And allow the acting to fill in the rest.”
Lewis published his novella in serialized form in London’s Guardian newspaper at the height of World War II. An Oxford and Cambridge professor perhaps now most remembered for his “Chronicles of Narnia” allegorical fantasy novels, “He lived in a very high academic world,” McLean points out. “He knew his worldview would be kind of out of step with the people he hung out with.”
Lewis reflected in 1959 that writing “Screwtape” had been an easy but queasy project, “all dust, grit, thrist and itch.”
McLean admitted his experience has been rather different.
“I love playing Screwtape,” he laughed. “I mean, good night! It’s just so, so much fun. It allows me to play someone who’s much smarter than me, who has a much better vocabulary than I do. He’s kind of a peacock. And I can access, for, I think, really good reasons, the pride that I have in me.”
