Freud's Last Session at New World Stages
Do I expect too much of New World Stages?
To any experienced in the theater, the preceding sentence may seem odd and misinformed. New World Stages has no standing on Broadway. In fact, the seven-theater establishment is housed in what was once an underground movie theater. But the Stages have good judgment, after picking up revivals of Rent and Avenue Q, or so it would seem. But when I went to see the longest running show Off-Broadway this season, New World Stages disappointed me. They put on a play that was long, inane, and monotonous. The show was wildly rambling and had little point, describing a fictional meeting between C.S. Lewis (Mark H. Dold), the deeply theist author of The Chronicles of Narnia, and Sigmund Freud (Martin Rayner), the atheist psychologist who managed to link sex to innumerable everyday activities. To call the play well-developed would be similar in nature to calling Elton John a real man’s man. It makes no sense to me, and lacks any semblance of a plot. Sure, the play was complicated, and there were moments where I could detect some things that were meant to be humor, but all in all I was nothing if not a man whose time had been wasted.
Now, to be fair, there are only two people in the play, and one, Martin Rayner, who usually plays the part of Freud, was absent, leaving dual understudy Tuck Milligan in his place. Milligan was a boring and unpracticed actor, and the performance seemed to mostly consist of Mark H. Dold attempting to coax Milligan into entering the fun and games of the play’s intensiveness, such as it was. The actors themselves didn’t seem like they actually liked the work they were performing. I agree. The play had all the drama of a fifth grade report on Freud plagiarized from a few of his better books. Perhaps if I had seen the play with Rayner in the title role, I would have felt differently. For some reason, though, I don’t think so.
One can’t fault the playwright, Mark St. Germain, for running with an intriguing idea. In 1939, Freud met with a young professor in his new home of England. St. Germain was interested in the possibility that this professor could have been C.S. Lewis. He imagined that “the meeting between these two men [would be] timeless.” The problem with Mr. St. Germain is that he gets so into the idea of religion that he makes the play seem like an amateur debate over the legitimacy of the Catholic Church. Forgive me for expecting more of two of the most brilliant writers of the twentieth century, but I believe that if Lewis and Freud did meet (unlikely, since Freud was, at the time, in the midst of spiraling into a deep, solitary depression that would cause his purposeful morphine overdose) their conversation would be much more engaging and much more entertaining. St. Germain wasn’t up for a premise this bold. Perhaps in the future he should remain in the realm of bedroom farces or, better yet, one-man shows. St. Germain’s droning rhetoric would be perfect for a graying man reclining in a director’s chair as the audience succumbs to slumber.
In another place, during a different, less enjoyable season, Session would have impressed me further. It was just that in one of my more respected Off-Broadway theaters, I wanted more than what I was given. I craved a show that gave Freud all he deserved, and Lewis all the literary self-references he could possibly spout. If I could sum up the faults of this show in one sentence, it would be this—It wasn’t enough. Good enough? Maybe. Not substantive enough? That could be it. But the key word is enough. Theater should exceed expectations, astound you in a part of your sub-conscious where before you had only stored dreary reflection. Freud’s Last Session did not give me that. It stayed firmly in reality, something the arts are meant to transcend. Sorry, New World Stages, but one dud ain’t bad. Maybe next time.
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