EXTENDED BY POPULAR DEMAND THROUGH FEBRUARY 15th

By Venus Zarris

Fellowship for the Performing Arts brings its successful adaptation of C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters to the Mercury Theater for its Chicago premiere. This is one of those rare and wonderful productions where a larger than life, bombastic and affected performance is just what the script requires to carry us through the extensive and intricate monologues. This kind of exaggeration is normally the stuff of children’s theater. But when delivering the lengthy letters of a mentor demon to an inexperienced minion, this broad technique not only fits the bill, but also is necessary to convey the complexity of concepts involved in leading the faithful astray.

Playwright/actor Max McLean takes on this riveting excursion into the underworld with the kind of verbose charm seldom allowed, much less achieved, in conventional theater. His Screwtape is on par with Shaffer’s Salieri or Dickens’ Scrooge. He is a perfectly pompous and ostentatious officer of the netherworld; hell bent on aiding and abetting the deviate pursuit of acquiring ever more souls for the ravenous flames of perdition.

It opens with an after dinner speech for the Graduation Banquet at the Tempters’ Training College for Young Devils where Screwtape laments over the mediocre menu. “Gastronomically, all of this was deplorable.” he complains and then goes on to fondly remember feasts where abhorrent sinners, such as Hitler or Stalin, were the favored entrees.

The scene then shifts to his office in Hell where he reads and responds to the letters from his nephew Wormwood, a junior tempter attempting to secure the damnation of a living human. Screwtape dictates his corresponding letters to Toadpipe, his whimsically witty and wordless demon secretary. Yvonne Gougelet creates this funny and fantastical creature with otherworldly physicality and mischievous imagination.

The brilliant design team realizes this suspended nightmarish realm with exceptional skill and conceptual creativity. Hell might be bottomless, but this is a classy little minimalist shelf, located on the way down. The visual details are deceptively simple and gradually unfold as the letters are exchanged.

Director Jeffrey Fiske delivers beautifully crafted and eloquently executed theater to be sure. But one can’t help but view things, at least to some extent, though personal filters and from where I sit the heavy-handed Christian sermonizing of C. S. Lewis’ source material is overtly distasteful. It is a true testament to the success of the production that it overcomes this dogmatic propaganda to the point of delivering a delightful theatrical encounter.

Lewis subversively castigates intellectual thought as one of the primary tools of demonic deception within the framework of one of the most heady and erudite diatribes imaginable. In essence, he purports that humans deceive themselves with the arrogant and egotistical musings of academic and cerebral rationalization while hypocritically employing this very same method of thought to create his dramatic thesis. It sounds too close to the neo-conservative religious right’s on-going scathing contemporary campaign against intellectualism.

Essentially, thinking is bad for anyone other than the very few elitist scholarly Christians who can ‘handle it’ and use it for good.

So once again, god has given us these unfathomable minds that we really shouldn’t exercise too much for fear they will be the cause of our ultimate mortal downfall. To which I say, ‘Way to hand your infant a loaded gun on their first Birthday.’

There is always something thrilling about listening to the elucidations of a strong intellect pontificate on a subject for which it feels passionate, even when the thoughts expressed run contrary to one’s own opinions or beliefs. But that excitement quickly turns to annoyance when it excludes the audience by asserting exclusivity on the right to think.

Still, the sheer beautiful theatricality and devilishly playful wickedness of this gorgeous production overcomes Lewis’ audacity and makes for a uniquely entertaining event.

3 ½ STARS

(”The Screwtape Letters” EXTENDED BY POPULAR DEMAND THROUGH FEBRUARY 15th at The Mercury Theater, 3745 N. Southport Ave. 773-325-1700.)

EXTENDED BY POPULAR DEMAND THROUGH FEBRUARY 15th

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