Freud’s Last Session
Freud’s Last Session has been running for over a year now in New York City and won the Best New Play Off-Broadway Alliance Award for 2011. It has been reviewed fairly extensively and received quite a bit of praise.
Dramatist Mark St. Germain based the play on a book by Armand M. Nicholi Jr. entitled, The Question of God: CS Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life. All theses weighty issues are skillfully investigated and cleverly disputed in this imaginary 1939 meeting between the then eighty year old Sigmund Freud and the younger intellectual C.S. Lewis (later to author The Chronicles of Narnia).
I would have been happy to bring any young person to witness this battle of ideas. It would help to stimulate thinking and to sharpen the powers of reasoning. But the play has a great drawback: there is almost no emotional connection between the two men on stage, the two intellectual forces. The situation is arbitrarily constructed in order to create a platform of ideas. At no time are we nudged into a greater awareness of our common vulnerability and humanity, or made aware of the motivations behind ideas and their espousal.
My flight touched down many hours late and I arrived at the theatre hungry as well as tired. It would have been very easy for me to nod off, lulled by the rhythmic banter. However, this did not happen because of the marvelous performance of Martin Rayner as Sigmund Freud: intricate, layered, compelling, yet without losing the arrogant, opinionated, even somewhat tyrannical stance associated with Freud. I felt this man’s physical suffering. I believed this man to be near death. If only the writer had allowed C.S. Lewis to feel his pain also and become engaged on a deeper level. I would have found C.S. Lewis a much more sympathetic character if he had not been so fixed on arguments against suicide but rather had opened his heart in compassion, taking on the suffering of his opponent to together face mortality, their inevitable and universal end. Compassion and love might in itself be some sort of answer to nihilism. The play might then have ended on a transcendental note rather than a speculative one.
Tuck Milligan (Standby for C.S. Lewis) performed at the matinee I attended. He depicted the manners of a gentleman of his time, but not the character of someone with the sensitivity or depth necessary to achieve artistic accomplishment in the future. He does not seem a worthy opponent to Freud. Neither does he display awe toward this world famous figure nor a sense of being threatened by him in any way. This seems implausible. I could not figure out why he stayed to talk.
Tyler Marchant, director, could have done more with what he had. He might have encouraged a more romantic, vulnerable, and creative characterization from Mr. Milligan who is obviously an experienced and capable actor. He needed to strive to find ways to deepen the connection between the men. In acting as in life, what is not spoken is as important as what is. Freud leaves C.S. Lewis alone in his study several times. These moments are not constructed carefully enough to reveal anything new about either character or about their hidden feelings or tensions.
The set was most impressive (Brian Prather) as was the music (Beth Lake) and lighting (Clifton Taylor).
Ultimately, I was drawn into the play not by what Dr. Freud said, or how C. S. Lewis countered his adversary’s argument, but by how Freud’s pain and demise are so exquisitely shaped by Martin Rayner.