In reading the role of C.S. Lewis, I get to say (and wrestle with) lines like:
“If you had gone up to Buddha and asked him, ‘Are you the son of Brahma?’ he would have said, ‘You are in a vale of illusion.’ If you asked Mohammad, ‘Are you Allah?’ he would have thought you daft and cut your head off. Only Christ made the appalling claim to be the Messiah.”
“It’s the most difficult question of all, isn’t it? If God is good, He would make His creatures perfectly happy. But we aren’t. So God lacks either goodness, or power, or both…..I can’t justify your pain. Yet I can’t imagine God desires it.”
-Terry Weber (C. S. Lewis)
The Sunday School class that I teach at Erin Presbyterian just finished an 8-week session on basic questions of the Christian faith. Many of those very questions are posed in Freud’s Last Session. Does God exist? If God is all-powerful and all-loving, why is there suffering? Is Jesus Christ the only path to salvation? These questions deserve serious and thoughtful discussion, and Christians need not fear to engage non-believers in honest and lively debate. Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis give strong voice to positions on opposite sides of the issues, and the audience will enjoy both the logic of the arguments and the passion with which they are presented.
– Joe Jaynes (Sigmund Freud)
Freud’s Last Session is the second script by Mark St. Germain that I have had the opportunity to direct and I deeply admire the way he writes characters. He finds a way for his characters to ask each other and us, through our engagement with the play, very important questions about humanity, faith, and the relationships we have with our world and each other. In this play specifically he chooses to use two people who were very highly respected in their fields and whose works we still wrestle with today. A conversation between such strong characters as Lewis and Freud is something I would have loved to witness and Mark St. Germain does a beautiful job of transporting us there through this play.
– Danielle Roos (Director)
Looking forward to the Staged Reading on Monday!