Also this issue:

Cloaking Devices
Susan Fenton and Anne Seidman create revealing work that plays hard to get.
-Robin Rice

Paradise Redefined
-Susan Hagen

First Friday Focus

Politics Unusual
-A.D. Amorosi

Becoming: Shakespeare
-Debra Auspitz

The Outside In
-Sam Adams

Anatomy Lessons
-Meredith Broussard

The (Un)Beat(en) Generation
-Paul Burress

October 3- 9, 2002

theater

Screwed Up

Whoâs your daddy?: Tony Lawton takes you to the dark side.

by Toby Zinman

The set bodes well: scenes from Brueghel paintings hanging on heavy red draperies, an infernal glow. Enter a fiend in a three-piece suit, carrying an attaché case. But what looked promising turns out to be a glimpse of the eternal: two-plus hours of non-stop preaching. This is Theology 101, and sitting through this play is hell.

C.S. Lewis wrote The Screwtape Letters and Tony Lawton adapted the book for the stage; he also performs what is nearly a non-stop monologue. Add to this prodigious feat of memory his tap-dancing, chair-flinging, fire-eating, whip-cracking and general all around knock-yourself-out performance. All in the service of a work so tedious, so obvious, so smug and self-righteous, that the evening feels like a penance.

The charm of C.S. Lewis' Narnia books is that although they are for children, their layers of meaning provide additional pleasure to adults. To try to work this trick in reverse is fatal -- i.e., writing an adult work which seems to be aimed at children. Well, maybe teenagers.

Here's the plot:

A middle-management devil, Wormwood, is in charge of a "patient"; it is his job to corrupt this young man and win him from the Enemy (i.e., the Christian God). He sends progress reports to his superior, a devil named Screwtape, who writes back instructions and advice, which Lawton "reads" aloud. We hear how love is a divine plot, that war is diabolically "entertaining" but not necessarily evil, blah blah blah, and there are immense lectures on the most obvious ironies of human nature.

There is a sexy secretary (Monica Moran) who delivers the Screwtape letters and provides various dancing, snarling and seduction, most of which is embarrassing (the choreography by Myra Bazell, except for the nifty tap-dancing bit, is surprisingly silly).

Occasionally there is a clever moment, as when Lawton changes from his tap shoes to his normal shoes and sings Mister Rogers' song. But those moments are very few.

Ask anybody. Ask Milton. Ask Mick Jagger. Ask your preacher. The devil is supposed to be tempting, a man of grace, assuming a pleasant shape, etc., etc. If the devil just bores you to death, it's hardly a triumph for Evil.