Dying Freud Debates God With C.S. Lewis

By JOHN SIMON
Business Week
Published: July 27, 2010

July 27 (Bloomberg) — What could have happened if the atheistic Sigmund Freud had met the newly religious British author C.S. Lewis three weeks before the Viennese doctor’s death in London on Sept. 23, 1939?

This is what Mark St. Germain ponders in his delightful comedy-drama “Freud’s Last Session” at New York’s Little Theatre. If it did not happen exactly like this, it should have. Suggested by Harvard psychiatrist Armand M. Nicholi’s “The Question of God,” the play is largely an intellectual dialogue, though St. Germain adroitly brings in phone calls to Freud’s analyst daughter Anna, Chamberlain’s declaration of war on the radio, air-raid sirens and
ominously buzzing airplanes.

Freud’s prosthetic jaw causes pain and even bleeding, with Lewis compassionately but helplessly standing by. Even Freud’s beloved dog avoids its master because of the smell from his cancer-tortured mouth.

The two brilliant men engage in a brainy fencing match of Olympic caliber. St. Germain tries to give equal voice to both, but Freud, the wittily deflating skeptic, inevitably gets better lines than Lewis, the earnestly hopeful Christian who would go on to write “The Chronicles of Narnia.” It
is sophisticated comic versus restrained straight man.

Take Freud mocking Lewis’s chastity: “No sex before marriage? It’s not only naive, it’s mindless cruelty. Like sending a young man off to perform his first concerto with an orchestra when the only time he’s ever played his piccolo was alone in his room.”

Martin Rayner looks just right as Freud, has the appropriate accent, suffers pain convincingly and delivers his sallies with wonderful glints in the eye. Mark H. Dold, tall and dignified, somewhat stiff with British reserve, is an impassioned Lewis. There is a marvelous rapprochement when the excruciated Freud is helped to the couch by Lewis, who sits solicitously beside him like an analyst’s analyst.

Brian Prather’s expert recreation of the doctor’s study is replete with the numerous statuettes and other antiquities that Freud avidly collected. Suitable costumes are by Mark Mariani, searching lighting by Clifton Taylor and the easefully animated direction is by Tyler Marchant.

Marjorie S. Deane Little Theater, 5 W. 63rd St. Information: +1-212-352-3101;
www.ovationtix.com Rating: ***