—Carol M. Rice
I have a confession to make: I’ve never been a fan of The Chronicles of Narnia. I’ve never understood the whole wardrobe thing, the talking Beavers, the White Witch’s Turkish Delight (which I’ve been given to understand tastes pretty awful).... It always just seemed kind of silly – even boring. I get the allegories into Christianity (Aslan the Lion is pretty cool), but I guess because I don’t particularly like fantasy in general, the stories never really appealed to me.
Fortunately, there’s a lot more to C.S. Lewis than Narnia. Last year, I was fortunate to see Fellowship for Performing Arts’ excellent presentation of The Screwtape Letters. This season’s production of C.S. Lewis On Stage: Further Up & Further In (at the AT&T Performing Arts Center for an extremely limited run) is completely different, yet equally excellent.
Written and performed by Max McLean, the founder and artistic director of FPA, Further Up & Further In brings Lewis, the atheist turned Christian, to glorious life. McLean’s words in the play are, as he said in the brief Q&A afterwards, about 95% Lewis’ own. He knows the man well, having also starred in The Most Reluctant Convert, a biographical film written and directed by Norman Stone that is based on the 2016 stage play C.S. Lewis on Stage: The Most Reluctant Convert, also by McLean (which itself was based on Lewis’ 1955 memoir Surprised by Joy). According to the program, Further Up & Further In is a sequel to this previous work, and while it stands on its own, I now plan to go watch the film.
Further Up & Further In takes place prior to the publication of Lewis’ first Narnia tale and before he met his wife, American poet Joy Davidman. (A side note: I am familiar with the play Shadowlands, about Lewis and his wife, which is how I became interested in C.S. Lewis as a person in the first place.)
McLean speaks to the audience directly as Lewis, discussing his faith and the various ways he “got there” logically. As a Christian who was “raised in the church,” I found many of his arguments fascinating: because Lewis came to Christianity on his own, the old traditions and tropes didn’t cut it. I liked that.
McLean does a wonderful job becoming Lewis, which is even more impressive if you get to see him do a talkback, as he’s almost nothing like the man he portrays on stage, but equally interesting. McLean’s a captivating storyteller and knows how to keep an audience engaged, and director Ken Denison has allowed the action to unfold without a lot of excess.
Kelly James Tighe designed the simple set: Lewis’ study at Magdalen College, Oxford in 1950, which works well for the show, and McLean utilizes everything on it – from writing letters, to drinking a cup of tea or glass of port, to just sitting in his favorite comfy chair talking to us.
I will say that I’m still undecided whether I liked Harry Feiner’s projection design. To start and end the show, I thought it was quite effective and I loved the pre-show image, but some of the overlapping and ever-changing images just seemed off throughout. It was as if the colors were too vibrant, or everything was a bit fuzzy, or things didn’t mesh quite right. I don’t know. I mainly thought it distracted from what was happening in the story rather than enhancing it. My companion really liked it, though, so maybe it was just me. However, we both enjoyed John Gromada’s original music and sound design.
Geoffrey D. Fishburn’s effective lighting design created pools and squares of light: McLean easily walked into and out of them as he told Lewis’ story, and Michael Blevins’ costume design beautifully generated “1950 college professor” vibes.
Further Up & Further In is less than 90 minutes long, and I could have listened nearly twice that to more of C.S. Lewis’ story as performed by Max McLean. The show will have closed by the time this review is published, but I will definitely be on the lookout for future productions by Fellowship for Performing Arts and encourage you to do the same.
WHEN: October 29-November 1 (show today)
WHERE: AT&T Performing Arts Center, Dallas Arts District
WEB: https://fpatheatre.com/shows/
