Chris Oden as C.S. Lewis and Dennis Creaghanas Sigmund Freud, in Freud’s Last Session
at Palm Beach Dramaworks.
(Photo by Alicia Donelan)
By Hap Erstein
A meeting between Sigmund Freud – the father of psychoanalysis and a staunch atheist – and C.S. Lewis, a convert to Christianity and author of the series of religious allegories, The Chronicles of Narnia.
There is no evidence that such a match-up ever took place, but it is the basis of Mark St. Germain’s what-if drama, Freud’s Last Session, opening Friday at West Palm Beach’s Palm Beach Dramaworks.
The pairing is not capricious, but based on the book The Question of God by Dr. Armand Nicholi, which St. Germain pored over a few years ago. As he explains, “In the last chapter, Dr. Nicholi makes the statement that there was a young Oxford don who did visit Freud in the last month of his life,” and suggests that it would be intriguing to think that the visitor was Lewis, a man of such opposite views from Freud’s.
“I constantly read trying to find something interesting to write about,” says St. Germain and when he got to the reference to Lewis, “Bells went off.”
This is not the first time St. Germain has written a speculative drama about famous figures from the past. He is probably best known so far for Camping with Henry and Tom, a fictional tale of industrialist Henry Ford and inventor Thomas Edison, spending a weekend together out in the wilderness.
“I guess I’m fascinated with history, I’m fascinated with the people who are larger-than-life,” says St. Germain. “It’s really interesting to spend time in their company. To try and put myself inside their heads and experience the world as they see it.”
When started to work on what became Freud’s Last Session, St. Germain considered himself fairly well versed in Freud and Lewis, but still he had to research them both more thoroughly. “I had to find out more about them, about who they were, as opposed to what they said. A year and a half later, I was still reading.”
In the play, Freud and Lewis discuss and debate their attitudes on such subjects as religion, sex, the meaning of life and the existence of God.
The only question St. Germain begs off of is which of the characters he personally sides with on the God question. “I always plead the Fifth on that,” he says, concerned that theatergoers might perceive a bias from him if he divulged his own beliefs.
The play tried out last year at Barrington (Mass.) Stage, where St. Germain help post-show talkbacks with the audience, trying to gauge whether he got the balance right. “And it was really interesting, because there was about a third of the audience that would come and congratulate you because Freud really won this argument,” he says. “And then a third would say, ‘Isn’t it a shame, but Lewis really trounced Freud.’ I like that.”
Even before Barrington Stage, though, Palm Beach Dramaworks asked St. Germain to come to South Florida for a test reading of the script. ““I was very happy to do that, because it was a chance to hear it, watch the audience and do some rewrites on it,” he explains. “The actors did a terrific job, I thought, and it was a good experience.”
So he was equally pleased to grant Dramaworks the rights to produce the show now, even though it is still running off-Broadway. Describing its evolution since that 2009 reading, St. Germain says, “I think it’s a much stronger play. I think the arguments are developed more deeply and I think there’s more of the personalities of the men.”
The play opened off-Broadway in July with the Barrington Stage cast, after St. Germain considered, but ultimately rejected, recasting it with two box-office names and taking it to Broadway.
“I had been approached to do that, but I really felt that if you have a production you’re happy with, it was really crazy to try to do something else,” he says. “You’re always taking a chance that it’s not going to come together in the same way. And funding is so much more difficult, you can wait for years to try to raise the money.”
Besides, he feels that off-Broadway – or regional theater – is a better fit for plays of ideas, where audiences go to listen and think. “I think the Broadway audience is mostly lured these days by the spectacle, or the name performers within a play.”
Freud’s Last Session has been an Energizer bunny in New York, running a remarkable five months so far, In part, St. Germain believes, this is due to a renewed interest in spirituality in the nation and a hunger for the answers that Freud himself sought. “I think these are eternal questions, but these are things that most of the time you don’t spend an evening thinking about. Most of don’t put two minutes thought into it a day.”
Still, he emphasizes, the play is “about people, it’s not about debate itself. We have to feel that we’re in the room with people who aren’t simply icons. We have to get them down off the mantel and see them as people who have ideas. To see Freud, who is in the last stages of his life, and Lewis, whose career is just beginning, and just experience them.
Freud’s Last Session, says St. Germain, allows theatergoers “to see the world through the eyes of two geniuses and then to look at their own lives and their own beliefs.”
FREUD’S LAST SESSION, Palm Beach Dramaworks, 322 Banyan Blvd., West Palm Beach. Through Sunday, Feb. 6. Tickets; $47. Call: (561) 514-4042.