INTERVIEW: Max McLean brings C.S. Lewis to stage with ‘Most Reluctant Convert’
Max McLean is a man who certainly knows the ins and outs of C.S. Lewis. For the past decade, the actor has been adapting the writer’s work for the stage, and his latest project is C.S. Lewis Onstage: The Most Reluctant Convert, currently playing an extended run at New York City’s Acorn Theatre on 42nd Street. Audience members can expect to take a journey with Lewis, as portrayed by McLean, as the writer discusses his conversion to the Christian faith.
The 80-minute evening follows McLean’s other theatrical offerings centered on Lewis, including The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce.
“It’s kind of the way Lewis attracts people; you kind of go in hook, line and sinker with him,” McLean said in a recent phone interview. “He’s become a spiritual guide and helps me to understand my faith as well as reality in a way that perhaps I would never have understood it. I also love the way he engages the imagination, which allows it to be expressed in theatrical forms. … Even in his fiction, he’s essentially retelling his conversion story, and with that, there’s an inherent drama in conversion.”
After adapting Screwtape and The Great Divorce, McLean kept digging into Lewis’ works. McLean freely admitted that Lewis is a tough read, and so he turned to the author’s nonfiction work and read a lot of biographies of the man. “That’s when I realized that he’s retelling his own conversion story or parts of his conversion story in these pieces of fiction that he wrote,” McLean said. “So I said, OK, well, I’m going to read his own account very, very closely — his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, as well as multiple biographies. … Most of his biographies are based on his collected letters, so I read a lot of his letters as well. And all of that pieced together to tell a coherent through-line story arc from beginning to end.”
The Most Reluctant Convert is presented by McLean’s theatrical company, Fellowship for Performing Arts, which stages shows with a Christian worldview for diverse audiences. McLean knows that many audience members at his current show have been right there alongside him this past decade journeying through Lewis’ work.
“That’s certainly understandable because of the admiration so many people have of Lewis and wanting to get more of him and also the desire to understand it because I think a lot of people struggle with reading him because he’s not an easy read,” the actor said. “One of the things that we do or what theater does is it makes his work more accessible. It adds a theatricality, a tension, an action that is not necessarily there on the page, and, of course, as an actor, you’re trying to make it coherent for the audience.”
To adapt Lewis’ work, McLean needs to be a good editor. The author’s original sentences were quite long, and in the theater world, there is no need for intuitive verbosity. Plus, Lewis was an academic who wrote in another time, and McLean is presenting a theater piece for a 2017 audience. “However, even in the thinning process, I try to use his words, so a 40-word sentence may become a 16-word sentence,” he said. “But they’re his 16 words.”
McLean believes that many of Lewis’ fans are Christian and run the gamut from liberal to conservative to Pentecostal to Mormon to Catholic to Protestant and Anglican. However, there are others, no matter their faith, who are attracted to deep questions about faith and life.
“I think the title, The Most Reluctant Convert, is appealing,” he said. “I also think people want to discuss religious themes. They don’t know how because you’re not supposed to talk about politics and religion, and yet that’s what we want to talk about. So there is this sense of it’s a safe place to have this conversation, and you don’t have to agree with it. Nothing is going to be asked of you. You sit back and suspend disbelief. Enter Lewis’ world, and either you enjoy it or you don’t. I think people do enjoy it. I think they like the machinations of his mind, which is really quite an extraordinary intellect, and his use of language, the constellation of ideas, his vivid imaginative life, the way the intellect and the emotions are connected. I think these are all things that are very appealing.”
Fellowship for Performing Arts has presented regularly in New York City and around the nation. In 2016, they brought Martin Luther to the stage with Martin Luther on Trial. They also opened The Screwtape Letters in London, and before these productions, they were focused on The Great Divorce.
“I think Luther was a big step,” McLean said. “Luther is a known anti-Semitic, and it’s probably one of the reasons why there hadn’t been that much done with him. And yet he’s a seminal figure in the whole last millennia of Christianity, the father of the Reformation, both good and bad. He’s a Shakespeare-sized character, so I was really pleased by how people responded to Luther. I remember one time we had a group of 80 students from a very conservative Jewish high school … and we heard from them and how much they appreciated how we handled the Jewish question.”
He added: “We wanted to deal with all sides of the question. We wanted to give the Jewish point of view. We wanted to give the Catholic point of view, and we also wanted Luther to give his point of view. And not only that, we gave the Devil’s point of view, which was kind of the cynicism, the skepticism of all things religious.”
With Martin Luther on Trial, The Most Reluctant Convert and the Fellowship’s other theatrical offerings, McLean and his company are able to further explore their faith and artistic talents. “Your work is so important,” he said. “It’s such a driving force that when it’s constantly integrated with faith, you’re just forced to dig deeper and to bring it into your day-to-day reality. So I think it’s really key to do that.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
C.S. Lewis Onstage: The Most Reluctant Convert is currently playing the Acorn Theatre at 410 W. 42nd St. in New York City. Click here for more information and tickets.
