A play that features an intellectual sparring match between religious hope and profane reality runs through April 3 on Riverside Theatre’s Waxlax Stage. “Freud’s Last Session” is presented in the round, with the audience lining the four-sided stage like spectators at a heavyweight bout.
It is the round of the century. Playwright Mark St. Germain sets the action on Sept. 3, 1939, the day England declared war on Germany. Our champions – Christian apologist C.S. Lewis (played by David Schmittou) and proto-psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (played by Steve Brady) – take off the gloves in a freewheeling debate about religious belief, human nature and the fate of humankind. The opponents in this fictional matchup have at each other not on a boxing ring canvas, but in the well-appointed London office of Freud. Complete with a conspicuous rug-covered couch and a desk bristling with antique statuettes, the intimate set was lovingly put together by Riverside’s producing artistic director Allen D. Cornell, who also directed the show.
Persecuted by the Nazis and forced to flee Austria after the German annexation in 1939, Freud is now 83, and advanced oral cancer is killing him. The inescapable fact of his pain and imminent death is the defense with which Freud forcefully counters Lewis’ assertions that a benevolent God is both the mover and goal of human affairs.
In 1939 Lewis was 40 years old. His Christ-oriented fantasy series “The Chronicles of Narnia” was still 10 years in the future; in this play he is the author of Pilgrim’s Recess (1933). The satirical update of Bunyon’s “Pilgrim’s Progress” describes a modern wayfarer’s search for faith. The book is mentioned at the start of the play for its cartoonish characterization of Freudian thought. Lewis, upon entering Freud’s study, offers a sardonic apology in the belief that the great man was offended by it.
No, Freud says; he never read it. He has invited the younger man for tea to discuss Lewis’ “essay on Paradise Lost” (an anachronism; Lewis’ “A Preface to Paradise Lost” was published in 1942). Freud explains that Milton’s epic poem had comforted him many years before, during a separation from his future wife, Martha.
“You were comforted by a clash between God and Satan?” asks Lewis.
“I didn’t say which side I was on,” answers Freud, who then asserts that Milton gave Satan “the best poetry.”
After an ominous fit of coughing, Freud describes the ravages of his cancer and the discussion turns to the concept of God. Lewis explains that he, like Freud, was once an atheist, until he “was struck by a thought in the sidecar of his brother’s motorbike on the way to the zoo.”
Freud counters that Lewis is “a victim either of a conversion experience or a hallucinatory psychosis.” The battle thus engaged, the men nevertheless find themselves often on the same side of the intellectual fence. Lewis argues for an analytic understanding of God, an approach that Freud, with his training in scientific method, can appreciate.
Like Lewis, Freud also has a God fixation; the knickknacks adorning every horizontal surface in his office are representations of the deities of antiquity. Although he opposes Lewis’ pro-God arguments, he is well read in the writings of spiritual belief and presents an apt counterargument for every idea that Lewis advances.
Psychoanalytically speaking, the two also share a deeply ingrained contempt for their fathers. Lewis’ was a God-fearing Christian and household tyrant. Freud never forgave his father, an Orthodox Jew, for his meek response to an anti-Semite who knocked the parental homburg into the mud.
Freud and Lewis both have a passion for argument. In their war of words, one or the other may occasionally concede a point, but never a premise. Fortunately for us, their exchanges are often barbed with witticisms that are as sharp as their insights.
Their discussion is interrupted early on by an air-raid siren that sends them scrambling for their government-issued gas masks and leaves them, after the fact, momentarily unstrung by the fear each man felt – for very different reasons – in the face of danger.
The self-examination this engenders takes their dispute into far-ranging territory, covering the topics of joke-telling, farting, music appreciation, morality and, of course, sex.
Although only two actors occupy the stage, a radio plays the parts of commentator and chorus on world events. On Sept. 1, Hitler had invaded Poland, killing thousands. Throughout the play, Freud impatiently fiddles with the dial for news of England’s response.
The radio has the play’s last word in King George VI’s famous address to the British people, or rather the end of his speech, in which he invokes the Deity no less than three times: “… we can only do the right as we see the right, and reverently commit our cause to God. If one and all we keep resolutely faithful to it, ready for whatever service or sacrifice it may demand, then, with God’s help, we shall prevail. May He bless us and keep us all.”
Steve Brady as Freud slips into his character completely and with little effort. As Milton did for Satan, Mark St. Germain gave Freud the best poetry in the play, and the archest lines – book-ended by a couple scenes of frightful suffering. He also gave the psychoanalyst oral gratification in the shape of a magnificent stogie on which Brady puffs happily for a fragrant few minutes.
David Schmittou gives Professor Lewis the earnestness of a true believer, leavened with a boyish humor that peeps around the edges of his donnish demeanor. And while Schmittou’s Lewis rises to Freud’s intellectual challenges, the actor is also capable of shocked modesty when the subject turns to sex, and moral outrage at the suggestion of suicide as a rational alternative to a painful death.
The men’s costumes, designed by Anna Hillbery, were appropriately tweedy and sensible. It was a delight to see Freud, near the end of the play, pull the watch on its chain out of his vest pocket and consult it.
While it is new to Vero Beach, “Freud’s Last Session” played at Palm Beach Dramaworks in November 2010, only months after it opened off-Broadway at New World Stages. The play’s original premier was in the summer of 2009 at Barrington Theatre Company in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. The play was inspired by a book by Harvard psychiatrist Dr. Armand M. Nicholi Jr. Published in 2002, “The Question of God” compared the writings of C.S. Lewis on belief in God with the rationalist philosophy of Sigmund Freud.
