A new one-man play about one man’s spiritual pilgrimage, C.S. Lewis on Stage: The Most Reluctant Convert, opens with a riff against a cruel, indifferent, and seemingly meaningless universe reminiscent of a Woody Allen monologue. “And what is ‘life’?” the protagonist asks in defending his youthful atheism. “It is so arranged that creatures live by preying on another…Creatures are born in pain, live by inflicting pain, and mostly die in pain.”

Playwright, director, and actor Max McLean achieves something rarely seen on stage or screen: a truthful, richly textured, and witty account of religious conversion. C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), the Oxford scholar renowned for works such as The Chronicles of Narnia and The Screwtape Letters, famously abandoned his atheism and became a Christian—but only after a long and tortuous struggle to reconcile his “ruthless dialectic” with the claims of the gospel. McLean traces Lewis’s journey with a script informed by an intimate knowledge of his subject’s thought and writings.