"An Evening with C.S. Lewis" Featuring David Payne | Stage Play Excerpts & Interview w/David Theroux

welcome again my name is david thoreau i'm the president of the cs lewis society of california i want to welcome you uh to our special event this evening we're so delighted that you joined with us uh for those new to the cs lewis society we invite you to visit our website which is lewissociety.org and send us an email note to info lewis society.org and be happy to add you to our regular email list tonight we're hosting a widely acclaimed one-man stage play entitled an evening with c.s lewis my life's journey with this british actor and playwright david payne david has performed an evening with c.s lewis well over a thousand times thrilling over a million viewers and winning him such accolades from critics as extraordinary a must-see a master class brilliant and far more wonderful comments on his work we incidentally had the pleasure of co-sponsoring the play in april 2019 in san francisco at the marines memorial theater there were six performances and incidentally if you go to the cs lewis society youtube channel you'll find an interview by me of david on stage at the end of the saturday performance we were preparing incidentally to co-sponsor uh the stage play in san jose at the california theater this past march but the covet 19 pandemic hit and the performances by david were were discontinued across the country and elsewhere as a result we're especially pleased to be hosting our event this evening our format for tonight is we're going to first show the video of the play which has been edited by david downed for our time constraints but just long enough to tantalize you to want to see the entire show afterward we'll have of course a conversation with david and questions from you in the audience as background for the play itself the setting is the year 1963 and the world-renowned author c.s lewis is hosting a group of american writers at his home near oxford they're about to experience a captivating evening with a man who's engaging conversation and spontaneous humor have made him one of the great recon tours of his day in the visit lewis recalls the events in people that inspired and shaped his life including his childhood his education his career his spiritual journey from a militant atheism to embrace christianity his books his family and friends including j.r.r tolkien and other members of the literary group they founded called the inklings and the american woman joy davidman who he married and turned his life upside down so let's begin the show well good evening my name is c.s lewis but do feel free to call me jack most of my friends do right at the outset let me answer a question i'm very often asked by people who know that my real name is not jack and wonder how i came to be so named well that dates back to when i was four years old and even at that tender young age i'd already come to the conclusion that my given names clive staples would be a serious impediment to my future happiness so one day i marched up to my parents pointed to myself and said he is jaxy and thereafter i would answer to no other name it was later shortened to jack and that's how i have been known ever since jackson because that was the name of my first dog who by the way had another rather unfortunate first in his short canine career he was the first dog ever to be run over by a motorcar in northern ireland and as there was only one such vehicle in the province at the time and it ran very slow this was no mean achievement well welcome to my home i hope you're not too squashed in british houses are not as big as their american counterparts i'm told now i know what you're thinking you're thinking exactly what the poet t.s eliot said to me when he first met me mr lewis you appear much older than your published photographs would lead me to believe [Music] one felt like replying mr elliot you appear more lucid than your published parents would lead me to believe but i refrained though that first meeting between us was a little tense we eventually went on to become quite good friends though to this day we've maintained a mutual dislike for each other's literary offerings and speaking of literary offerings your leader tells me you are mostly writers and all from america well i have to say without my american readers i think my success as an author would be somewhat diminished what do they say an author is not without honor save in his own country or is that a prophet now your leader also tells me you want me to give you a sort of potted history of my life well be it on your own heads i never think a man is at his best when he is on public show mainly because his ego invariably is and when that little monster is rampant facts are really safe e-g-o embellish garnish overstate horny and i were allies from the start and we had such fun in our childhood home in belfast it was called little lee however it was anything but little it was so large it seemed to me more like a city than a house and i am a product of long corridors upstairs indoor silences attics to be explored in solitude and because my parents were bookish people endless books and i turned the pages of many of them you see my parents had taught me that to open a new book was to open oneself to a new adventure and so i had many wonderful adventures without so much as putting one foot outside the front door of our house and one of the greatest adventures i ever had was when i was one day thumbing through a book of poetry by longfellow and i stumbled across these words i heard a voice that cried boulder the beautiful is dead dead now i had never even heard of boulder but these words brought on an extraordinary mystical sensation i had this notion of great expanses of northern sky and i was soon overwhelmed with an exquisite sense of joy of course the more i tried to hold on to this sensation the more it slipped away nevertheless it was those few words about border that first ignited my passion for norse mythology yes i loved that house but like all love affairs it had its sorrows my greatest sorrow came when i stood at the foot of my mother's bed just after she had lost her fight with cancer and at the time i remember thinking it's the end of my world i shall never be happy again things will never be the same again not long after mother died i was forced to leave little lee not because father was selling it but because i was being sent to boarding school in england can you imagine the desolation of a nine-year-old boy who has lost much of what he holds dear and then finds himself traveling to a foreign and foreboding land our destination when we reached the mainland was a small town about 20 miles north of london of which one of the principal establishments was windyard boarding school for boys the boarding school to which we were being sent its proprietor was also its headmaster and the boys called him oldie well one day oldie beat a boy so mercilessly that the authorities stepped in and closed the school down joyo joy i was sent back to belfast warney was less fortunate and shipped off to another boarding school in england and oldie was certified insane and committed to a mental institution now my joy was short-lived for a few months later i was once again boarding the ferry to england this time for another boarding school in the town of melvin which is in the heart of the english countryside and it was at malvern that my education really began and it was also at melvin that i made my first independent philosophical stand my perception of god was that he was rather like someone who never answers your letters so you eventually come to the conclusion that either they do not exist or you've got the address wrong and in my case i concluded that god did not exist and slid very happily into a youthful brand of atheism one day i invited tollers and a man called hugo dyson to dine with me at maudlin now at this juncture i ought to point out tallas is a very sincere christian as indeed is hugo and after we had dined as it was a barmy autumnal evening we took a turn as jane austen would say through the modeling grounds and our conversation ranged over many subjects but finally settled on religion and it was then that i happened to remark that i thought the story of christ was nothing more than a myth well that set tollers off jackie said in a way i have some sympathy with your remark as you know i believe all mythology contains some element of eternal truth but the story of christ is fundamentally different you see the author of that myth was god himself the myth actually took place at a precise point in human history and the whole of the myth is absolute truth i said even the dying and rising bit he said of course i said well thomas that is very hard to swallow jack he said you amaze me if you meet the idea of a dying and rising god in pagan literature you don't mind it at all you only object to it when you meet it in the gospels and he was right well by the time they left me it was 4 00 a.m in the morning and my mind was was in a whirl but when i put my head on the pillow that night i was beginning to see two things very clearly indeed you see i realized that i had come to accept that god was god primarily by a series of logical steps i also realized that if i was going to accept that christ was god it would not be by an act of logic but by an act of faith now the very next day warney and i had planned a trip to whips nade zoo we were going in warnings motorbike inside gun and what happened that morning is not easy to put into words so i shall put it this way when i got into that sidecar i did not believe that christ was god when i got out an hour and a half later at whips no zoo i did one day i was taking a tutorial and there was a knock on the door it was a college porter and he slipped a note in my hand and it read mrs gresham has been rushed into hospital and is asking for you as soon as the tutorial was over i called the hospital they told me that she had just had an operation for a broken femur she wouldn't be seeing anyone that night because she was too heavily sedated but that i could go in the next night and i did and when i walked into her room she said have you seen the doctors i said no she said well then you don't know do you i said no what she said it's cancer jack i said cancer i said joy i called the hospital they told me it was a broken femur she said jack it broke because it was riddled with cancer the doctors tell me i have bone cancer jack i said well what does that mean she said they also tell me i have weeks no more than months to live and then i went quiet she said are you right jack i said oh yes i'm fine she said no you're not what's up i said all right joy as you've asked i will tell you i just hate the thought of losing you in such a short time you've become one of my best friends she said thank you for saying that jack that means a lot to me but she said when i'm gone you'll have lots of friends there's tollers there's hugo and of course there's warning and before i could stop myself i said yes but i'm not in love with them joy she said what did you say i said i'm not in love with them i'm in love with you then she started crying and i thought oh i'm in trouble they're going to throw me out for upsetting a patient i said joy please don't cry i shouldn't have said that that was irresponsible i shouldn't have said it i've upset you she said jack i'm not crying because i'm upset i'm crying because i love you too i said are you sure said yes have done for some time so there we were holding hands like a couple of blood birds and then before i could stop myself i said joy will you marry me she said we are married jack i said yes in the eyes of the british government but not in the eyes of god will you marry me she said jack you know what the doctors are saying do you really want to go through all that i said yes i do i said do i have to get down on one knee she said well you didn't do it the first time you proposed i said well i can get down on one knee joy but some i might burst in she said well if they do count to five very slowly say a loud amen and get up looking very pious [Laughter] no jack she said if you're going to propose stay very close so i gripped her hand even hard and i said all right i'm not used to this she said well i'm going to make it easy for you the answer is yes i said that's it yes you said that's it i said i don't have to do anything else she said well you have to kiss me jack so i leaned forward and kissed her on the forehead no jack she said you have to kiss me properly so i leaned forward and kissed her on the lips and after i had kissed her i realized what i had done and i said goodness gracious i have not kissed a woman like that in over 30 years she said yes i can tell kiss me again you need the practice the last time she was rushed into a hospital she was in intense pain but she never lost her courage and she never lost her sense of perspective don't get me a posh coffin jack she said posh coffins are all rut and i was with her when she died both warning and i were plunged into despair what he did as he had often done in a crisis he turned to drink i did as i had often done in a crisis i picked up my pen and wrote and those early words that i wrote were very angry i was angry with myself i was angry with the doctors and i was very angry with god i remember one night screaming at him you led us up the garden path time after time when you seemed most gracious you were really preparing the next torture you know grief affects people in different ways doesn't it we're not all made the same for me it was like a mist had descended and engulfed me a morning mist if you like m-o-u-r-n-i-n-g and i felt so disorientated and i remember thinking things i'd never thought before saying things i'd never said before like screaming what i screamed at god and when i did scream that at him i was probably getting from it one of the few pleasures a man in anguish can get the pleasure of hitting back oh it was little more than mere abuse telling god what i thought of him and of course as in most abusive language what i thought didn't mean what i thought true only what i thought would offend him most and about two months after joy died i was lying in bed early in the morning and the sun was streaming through the window and i thought oh i must go out for an early morning walk and as i stepped out into the sunshine it was as though this gentle breeze had been waiting for me and it came by me seemed to caress me and then it moved off but as it moved off it was as though it took the mist with it because it was at that moment i realized i had been looking at things from the wrong perspective you see when i married joy i expected to have weeks no more than months with her i had been given just over three years and it wasn't about what i hadn't been given but what i had been given and he was the giver and she was the gift you know as i face the twilight years of my life i like to think of myself as a seed waiting patiently in the ground waiting to come up a flower in the gardener's good time gardener with a capital g waiting to come up into the real world the real awakening look back on from there this world will seem like a half-waking and that's why i have this other feeling that grows and grows so so i'm on the outside of the world the wrong side of the door i discern the freshness and purity of mourning but they do not make me fresh and pure i cannot mingle as i would like with the splendors i see but all the leaves of the new testament are wrestling with the rumor that it will not always be so one day god willing i will enter in and in there in beyond nature i shall eat of the tree of life i want to thank you david for your wonderful and inspiring work and i think this uh example is uh it's a small token of of your work um the full play incidentally runs about 80 minutes um and as i understand it in your performances you vary it as you go along because um you're drawing on the very rich history and knowledge that you have of lewis as well as your theatrical skills i did want to ask you though um you've been widely celebrated for your work but how exactly did you get your beginning in acting and your interest in those well it all started way back in the early 90s um 92 um i had to go well i didn't have to go but i agreed to go to nashville to be involved in a music project for a british company that wanted to set up a division in nashville and um i was there for two or three years and i was supposed to go back to england and but uh the contract got extended and during that extension i saw an advert a little display ad a um uh a bulletin issued by a theatrical company in nashville tennessee and the audition said um it was a shadow by the way the um the um story about c.s lewis which was a stage play um and a forum anyway it said auditions for schneiderlin i thought well i've got a british accent so i decided to go along and hoped i might get on a walk on walk-on park which didn't really require a british accent and then i ended up winning um the lead role c.s lewis and that where it all started and i don't know whether you can see it but up there there's a little poster and that was you probably can't see it yeah we see it that poster is this the poster that promoted the play in nashville tennessee that was my first acting role um as c s lewis and can you believe that c s lewis his stepson douglas crash him was there for our gala performance wow wow now this is the play shadow lands by william nicholson that's right which was made into two major films the bbc uh did a version with josh acklin and claire bloom and then sir richard attenborough did one with anthony hopkins and deborah winger do you have a reference for either of those by the way well um the the the bbc one was more accurate in many ways two boys whereas the anthony hopkins film only had one boy and that was because the director felt that it would the audience could sympathize a lot stronger for one boy than two so they cut david out and just did douglas um i thought um i really enjoyed deborah winger's a performance it's not that i didn't enjoy anthony hopkins but when i was talking to douglas once about shadowlands i asked him about anthony hopkins and i said how do you did it and he said well anthony plays anthony doesn't he but i thought barbara winger was just super but she really captured joy and she did a week's um a week's uh research i think with loyal lyle dorset at wheaton college area preparing for the role i thought she was wonderful i enjoyed that um i enjoyed anthony hopkins i mean he's a great actor and i enjoyed the film um so anyway that i got into acting just by going having a british accent and trying out for a role now the play and even with cs lewis is sort of your flagship play because you've written another what eight or more plays well yes um yeah i've written um a show called lewis and tog ian which is the last meeting with c.s lewis and tolkien um and then i wrote a play called weep for joy which for me was a more in-depth look of the shadowland story um which although shadowlands was a great film to watch it was pretty light on the spiritual side on the uh on uh lewis's conflicts with god and losing joy and rest restoration of faith and so i wanted to to explore that a little more and so i wrote week for joy um and then um the other relationship with lewis which is intriguing there are three women really in lewis's life serious women one was his mother who died when he was nine years old uh one of course was joy who he met in his mid-50s and then there was what i call his adopted mother um janie moore whom he met when he was 19 years old and had been introduced her to her by a man he was sharing um he was bulleted with in training for the first world war and uh his name was paddy moore paddy took lewis back to his home at weekends and that's when he met paddy's mother of his her husband had walked out years ago and she had a daughter and it seems as though they became strong in our friends paddy and louis where when they were on their way to the front line trenches or getting ready to go to the front line trenches paddy asked louis if if he died in the first world war which was very likely uh for frontline trench warfare would louis look after paddy's mother and pat his sister and uh he did die and lewis kept his promise and i think that is a reflection of one of the great attributes of lewis because she turned to be quite difficult in the end and lewis was faithful to his promise until she died in a nursing home in oxford right yeah though i wrote that one so that's we that was jack and the dragon because she was a bit of a dragon and i thought jack was a bit of a saint to look after her um and so that those uh lewis base plays um and i've written other ones i wrote prison of passion which is really um um an hour in the life of paul the apostle um and i wrote it because of a new translation which i've done the audio work for and they wanted me to to write a play for the launch and it's really um it's an hour in the life of paul the apostle and that hour is when he's under house arrest in rome and there is a servant girl that looks after his room and she is a secret christian to start off with and then she reveals herself to paul and he he can talk to her about many of the famous quotes he's in his pauline epistles so that's that one and i've just finished a new script called winston and it's about uh winston churchill now for those of you who don't know um david's company is called the burden baby productions and if you google it you will find the schedule of his stage productions which will hopefully be uh restarted in the new year um god willing uh yeah we've got some performances in january and in march but i talked to our booking agent and he said he really doesn't think things are going to open up until uh late april may and really the serious business will be from september onwards uh there the kobe thing is has uh really well we had had a full schedule um at the beginning of this year we had a full schedule right through to december and then cobit came along and after march pretty well everything got cancelled now um we're almost to the anniversary of louis's death november 22nd uh he died in 1963 on the same day that john f kennedy was assassinated and aldous huxley died and even though lewis was a world renowned figure because of the assassination of kennedy most people never learned of his death but i think one thing that's interesting i want to ask you about was louis and also tolkien too but lewis believed as i understand it that after two or three years after his death no one would remember who he was and his books would be out of print but that's not exactly what's happened do you have any comments on that well yeah i mean i think lewis couldn't conceive of his books really being around much long after his death i think he felt that tolkiens would be because he was so enamored with tolkien's work um but i think that um if you could have told him that for sure near the end of his death 50 60 years after he died his books would be selling as well as they've ever sold i think he just fallen over in disbelief yeah i think that's right i think that the uh one figure i've heard is that the narnia books the seven volumes have sold something like 150 million sets yeah it's well over 100 million right and i believe lord of the rings is about the same so this this tiny uh informal literary group the inklings that they had has had one of the biggest impacts on world culture with no really thought about trying to do that i mean they did want to write books that i felt needed to be written but they had no expectation i think along those lines now and i mean i think it's absolutely intriguing i mean the inklings yes that was a very important group but the two primary people in the englands were told kian and lewis and lewis was the driving force behind the inklings but these two men who ended up in oxford for different reasons tolkien was um a professor at pembroke college lewis was a tutor at baldwin college and um and they they they come together because of the english curriculum and which for many years of course it called during the intermediary years but these two men they one of the things that got them going was they said look we don't find what we are looking for by other writers so we better write it ourselves and so talking already been involved with the cimarillion which later led to the hobbit and um and the lord of the rings and and luis you know uh wrote various other novels in that genre and then ended up obviously writing the narnia books um and uh and and and these authors today are so successful so many years after the death and yet two men two oxford professors who were very ordinary men lived in very ordinary houses and yet had such an incredible impact on on the world and non-fantasy and one of the funny things about lewis also was that uh he gave away something like 80 to 90 percent of his royalties and um he didn't keep records of who he sent the money to because he had this massive correspondence and so the tax authorities would come after me he had no idea so he was always worried that he was going to be poor he was going to be broke um i did want to ask you what is it about lewis that you find most rewarding or inspiring or uh has had the biggest impact on you because i know the first book you read as i understand it was a grief observed because of the shadowlands play is that right the first book i read was the screw to eight letters what was good okay i read that when i was 17 years old all right um i read the grief observed because in during the um rehearsals for shadowlands the director said i think you'll find a grief observed a good book to read to kind of get to feel the relationship with jack and joy and so and it is of course it is and so i actually memorized that and i actually did that as a one-man play which i realized needed to be broader than just about that book and that's when it it sort of progressed into an evening with c.s lewis so that was the second was well i read mere christianity before that um so i i've known louis um but it was a grief observed that really got me stuck into lewis because do you have a favorite book by lewis so i mean i'm trying to think it's not the favorite book because it was lewis's favorite book and that was um until we have faced yeah he's most proud of his novel yeah yeah he was and and i i think the story is true i was you know there's so much i've read of lewis that sometimes i wonder whether i'm making things up well as i understand it lewis had a bit of a writer's block about that book he couldn't find the form to write it and um and after he met joy it was her discussions with him that enabled him to to find the form to write that book and to the point where i think he felt she deserved as much credit as he did for he dedicated it to her didn't he yes that's right and the interesting thing was it was one of his least successful books huh yeah for those of you who have not read it it was his last novel that he was most proud of it's a story of a woman who becomes queen in a pre-christian greek city-state uh and it's it's it's a it's a retelling of the cupid and psyche story myth but with uh louis louisian uh improvements i guess you could say oh it's a great book i love it yeah it is it's an amazing and it'll surprise you it's not very long either it's not it's a very short book considering so since you you did the um shadowlands of course and then the additional play about the three women that were influential in particular in lewis's life life lewis of course was very close to his mother who died of cancer when he was nine and then his wife died of cancer and his mother's death was a key factor in his turning away from christianity in fact really uh what i understand is that he was one of his plans was to write the definitive book against theism uh but every argument that he thought he had mastered just sort of turned to dust and then he in in his autobiography talks about how he was the most reluctant dejected convert in all of england because he sort of argued himself into a corner either he had admit that god existed or he had to essentially admit that he uh could not argue but do you do you see anything about that interesting juxtaposition of his mother's death from cancer enjoys death from cancer as far as it's almost like a book end of this yeah and i think yeah i mean of course you have this sense that um lewis as a boy found i mean he was he was struck down with grief but couldn't cry and and that was that's how he dealt with it was a big shock to him um i i think joy dying of cancer was just a reminder of of that time i'm sure it took him back to that time and of course when you read a grief observe which is the book he wrote after joy died i mean the first half of the book is very it's very dark because he's so he's devastated he's angry i mean he's angry with god he calls god a cosmic sadist an eternal biblic actor and um and and you can you almost sense that it it's not just joy he that there's reflections of his mother whom he prayed would be healed and um and and god didn't heal her um and then of course halfway through the book he goes out for this early morning walk and in the sunshine there's a gentle breeze and he suddenly he's he starts to see things from a different perspective and that um and he realizes that and starts to be very positive about joy um where he's been very negative about joy not about her about her dying um yeah so i think i think i can't believe that i mean we don't know it but i can't believe that there weren't uh the sort of the resurfacing of the anger that he felt when his mother died let me ask one more question then we'll open it up for our um audience and participants um lewis uh was one of the things that's interesting about him i believe is that he wrote all these books and apologetics and his scholarly books there's something like a hundred books of his work now and i think something over 300 books about him every year there's another 20 10 or 20 books about him so it's just an endless um to draw on and i believe that netflix is going to be doing uh the narnia series right and uh so it's it's like there's no limit to the impact that what he he dove into the significance and uh so it's it's a real um blessing to see you pursuing using his work and bringing it to all these wonderful audiences is that is there anything that you've learned most about your experience with uh writing the plays and acting and and d and digging into lewis's background that you think is particularly worth sharing with other people well i think the one thing that to me comes out to me is you know when you're playing someone like c.s lewis any i guess any actor when they're looking at a person they're playing they try and get into into the mindset of the actor the grief observed is a wonderful book to get a feel for louis um um but um the things that really stand out to me um are one that i think in in many ways he was a very humble man he lived a very modest life you talk about his five minutes he's always was worried about his and yet he was never really in danger of going broke but he was brought up to think about that um and yet he was so generous with israelites as you pointed out um uh and and you look at these aspects of the man you think well what a good man he was um he wasn't perfect none of us are right um but uh you know i think he was douglas maybe one or two others say that he was the most thoroughly christian man they've ever met and i think that's probably true as i say he wasn't perfect um but um you you were i i've come really to admire the man and when you delve into somebody like that there's a chance that you can come up and say oh well he's not quite the man i thought he was and yet i've always considered it a great honor and um people say has it affected your own spiritual life to ask me if it's affecting my own spirit's life and i think it's a bit pompous to say oh yes i think he has but i think you know the way i look at it is i think oh well if i could be if i could have the reputation that he had for what he was then i'd be a happy man so um let me open it up for questions from people and mark wambus okay mark i wanted to ask if nearly every sentence in that delightful play that you performed for us this evening or on that video comes from something that lewis wrote or some of it something that you made up that uh that you felt fitted his character which isn't actually from his writing um well uh um i would think maybe uh 10 15 is directly from lewis's writings um there's things that we don't we we don't know that we have to surmise according to the knowledge we have and therefore you construct a play like that um i have people come up to me sometimes and they say oh i love that quote that you quote and they'll give me the quote and they'll say now which i can't i can't remember which book i wrote it in and i was and they say and i say well he didn't write it um i wrote it but i wrote it in the way that i felt that lewis would would give it lewis was known for his humor for a star you know you couldn't uh douglas gresham his stepson says you couldn't be in a room more than five minutes with lewis without there being peels of laughter he had very boyish humor and um and i remember when i was talking to douglas and i was just launched an evening with c.s lewis and we were on we were at a conference can you believe in nashville which is where i live we were at a conference in nashville and um douglas was a key speaker on one night and i was doing an evening with c.s lewis the next night and i said to douglas i said is there any chance you can stay over and see the player i'd like your thoughts on it and he said i can't dave and he said i've got to go and do another speech for another college he said but i'll tell you this it better be funny and that's what douglas said to me yeah so um yes about 10 to 15 is directly direct quotes some of it is is is what i would call paraphrasing in other words taking the thoughts of lewis and when i was researching the book when i was writing the play my whole objective was to find the man behind the books and so i did a lot of research of not what i i've read a lot of his letters you know warnie compiled his letters his brother warning compared his letters into a book there's a book called letters to an american lady i read a lot of those i read them all actually because um you can find out a man about his books but you'll certainly find out a lot when you read his letters and so okay okay gregory uh two questions that are related about um about being a playwright uh what what drew you to churchill and i remember reading that c.s lewis said writing screw tape letters was very uncomfortable for him because he had to invert joy and i and i was wondering have you ever considered doing a one-man play playing screwtape you know snickering at sending out uh a lesser devil yeah i didn't actually when um david asked me what books what plays i've written i actually wrote a play um firstly um years ago many years ago i did uh get permission from the agents of the cs lewis estate at that time they've since changed to do a version of the screwtape letters and so i played uh screwtape and i had 12 demons um and from a college can you believe um and i had 12 demons um and then i wanted to actually take the screw tape concept and and re redo it in my own way not i could possibly do it as good as lewis obviously but lewis didn't write a play he wrote a book and i wanted to write a play so i called my play target practice the targets being humans and then in a similar way i wanted to look at temptation from the enemy's point of view so i called it wasn't screw tape it was in a set in the academy of fiends and i was professor damon and i had either a cast of 12 or even down to two and even down to one so i could do a smaller version for smaller productions um and i really enjoyed that the thing about louis was is he he he found it the most gritty book to write because all he said all i had to do was think about all the problems i'd had the previous week and i had my i had my research there you go can you hear me now yes okay um i came late in the game uh my son was at uh fort bending near nashville and went to princeton was an officer in the army and he just loved c.w lewis and he told me to get involved so this is the first um i read the book one of the books and this is the first meeting and i just enjoyed it immensely um uh i was a lapsed catholic and i came back to the faith and i'm i'm a retired marine corps colonel and i'm wondering his uh experience in the first world war i know in my life i was in vietnam that affected me the last 50 years how did his uh experience in the first world war affect his life when he came back to england the cs lewis and the war years the first world war um lewis had a really interesting perception of that war firstly um there was every chance he wouldn't come back from that war because the carnage on the front line trenches um in human lives was uh was awful um but he had this ability to almost see it as some something that wasn't really happening to him it was almost like it was surreal and um and he could almost separate himself from he was there but in a sense he he didn't um feel the strength of that war a bullet would pass by and he said oh it reminds me of what homer wrote yes um and it was almost a detachment um and i think that was probably part of the process the mind has for self-preservation when you are in intense danger so um and i'm not sure whether it affected much of his writings i think it affected more tolkien in his writings than it affected lewis but that's only that's only my perception of it because when you when you read his biography and and read about his war experience it's it's not terribly in-depth he does talk about um uh men crawled around like beetles dead corpses and things like that so it obviously did affect him um but it it seems to me he was able to almost separate himself from it do you want to mention um what happened to him and and how he was released from the war you remember well he got um wounded um argent next to him was killed hey well he his sergeant was killed his sergeant because the sergeant um stood between him as i understand it between the shell and and lewis so the sergeant was killed out right lewis got um shrapnel wounds um severe enough to have him sent back to england and by the time he had fully recovered the war was over but he always had a piece of shrapnel very close to his heart because they decided they wouldn't take it out as it was too dangerous yeah that's my understanding uh okay uh drew so have you ever considered writing a play about how c.s lewis wrote narnia well my play and evening with cs lewis um in well actually i wrote a play tolkien and lewis and tolkien and they um in the second act they tend to talk about why they wrote what they did and so lewis uh actually says talks to tolkien about why what he says what other people say about why he wrote what he he he's he says no matter what i say about why i wrote the books of narnia people don't believe it and then he goes on to say why he wrote the books of narnia um and um and um and he says it all started with images that rose in his mind a fall an umbrella um a queen on a sledge a magnificent lion and he says a a lion whom i met in a nightmare and then he goes on to say why he wrote that and how the christian part came in to the books which came in later after he had conceived the story didn't they have a didn't they flip a coin or something about one of them was going to write one kind of book and the other was going to write a different book do you know about that i thought there was a space trilogy well yeah that's it you're right yeah they did they did they flipped a coin i'm not quite sure the whole story okay gregory you have another question yeah um you as an actor do you have you know 220 minutes worth of material and you pick and choose which episodes you're gonna play each night or is the play exactly the same each night it it feels like there are sort of modules that you could put in or out yeah you know what um i well i go on the basis if it ain't broke don't try and fix it so the play i the play i did when i first did it years ago in 1990 around about 2000 if you'd been at that play and you were now to see the players is now it's a different play it's a different play partly because of content it's a different play because when you've done a play as many times have i done it as i have done it you find out what the audience likes and so i have found out what the audience appreciates um and it's not like pandering to the audience but it's also you know as an actor the last thing you want to do is lose the attention of the audience it's the worst thing in the world so you make sure you keep that attention um and so i don't change it a lot i tell you what does change it's delivery i find a lot of fun in adjusting the delivery and that's what keeps it fresh but there are tweaks i i've just done a few tweaks for the in the last well i can tell you now in the last two weeks three weeks i've just done um maybe four or five what i call major tweaks and um and kobit has allowed me to do it because i was going back over my script i thought you know what i think that could be better and so i've done that so if you saw that uh david if you saw the play the new player you'd say i'm not sure i remember that because it is different well even even the version that you edited down for us tonight is different from the play that we had in san francisco i mean yeah because it was for you that version you saw was done four years ago we are by the way recording a brand new version in the next uh i think two months oh good okay robert you had a question yeah so actually i saw the play in san francisco last year and to me the most memorable part of the most inspirational part was the story of hamlet how during his atheist years he said you know how could hamlets say i want to meet shakespeare it makes no sense you know how can we possibly want to get to know god oh yeah but then later he said hamlet couldn't mow shakespeare shakespeare wrote himself into the story and that is jesus jesus wrote himself into our story and that's how we know him and so i just thought that part of the play that's the one part that stuck out to me the most and i was curious which book that came from like like when did when did louis tell that story um you know i'm trying to think of it now i know the quote um um i think it probably may have come out of um uh surprised by joy i think i i you know what i do the one one of my problems is that um um when i started this writing this and doing it i was 55 years old i'm now 78. so to go back all those many years and figure out well where did that come from where did that come from where did that come from doesn't always work um and um but i got a feeling it's from surprised by joy but i couldn't be sure by the way if for those who have not read okay thank you attitude collections of lewis's um non-fiction essays um i would highly recommend it there's uh god in the dark is probably the best christian reflections is another excellent one and there are many others and a lot of people don't even know about them i also want to ask you david about your own conversion and how that was affected by your work on lewis well i was really converted when i was 16 years old and it was at a billy graham rally it wasn't um uh at the stadium it was a i went to a church that was taking a live feed from the stadium in those days that was quite major technology and and that's when i realized that the the the challenge of christianity was not just to accept christ as a savior but to accept christ as lord and that's when i became serious about that and then um and i got involved with all sorts of activities um evangelistic etc and um uh um my first wife and i my first wife died five years ago my first wife and i uh were very um involved in youth work for 20 years in our local church um but um and it was really um the latter year so i got him got involved doing louis um so so did your church work have i guess that had a was a factor in your decision to try out for the shadowlands play no not at all no i was um i was in nashville um i'd been involved in music um christian music particularly i've been involved with christian music for 20 odd years mostly in england but now in nashville and you know you get to a point sometimes when you're involved in something for so long you're almost on autopilot and it's being an autopilot is not very satisfactory yeah and i was desperate to find something that would take me out of my comfort zone and i saw this little display and it said auditions for shadowlands british accents to help and i thought well now that's interesting and um you know i've got a british accent so i'm gonna have a shot at it thinking i might get a small partner as i said earlier i won the lead role and and it not just took me out of my comfort zone it threw me into an experience and an excitement and an involvement and an energy i had not known for a number of years and i realized then that it would be acting and not music now originally as i understand it most of the performances you were doing for years were with churches um and other perhaps parent church groups but then the popularity and the words spread and now you know major theaters and concert halls and it's it's very exciting yeah well i i started off in churches because i had an agent that really sold the the acts that they did christian acts two churches but one day i said to him i said look i'm an actor i'm i'm enjoying doing the work at churches but i'm an actor i want to get on into a theater not just churches i don't mind doing churches but i want to i want to find out whether people would come along to a theater and say oh this is good or whether they say no that keep him in churches that's where he belongs and um and you've heard of moody radio i'm sure sure the guy there's a guy doing media radio in indianapolis he wanted me to do a performance in indianapolis linked to his radio station and it was the only time i said no he wanted to do it in a church and i said no i'll tell you what i'll do it if you do it in a theater he said well we can't make it work i said well then i'm not going to do it if you want to do it in a theater i'll come and do it i won't do it in a church now i may have been a bit and shouldn't have done but anyway i stuck to my guns and he said well there is a theater which seats 1200 people he said but i don't know whether we can make it work and i said well i tell you what i don't mind if it doesn't work i i don't you don't need to pay me and uh so they did it in a theater and they drew a thousand people yeah yeah here in the secular bay area in san francisco last spring you had six shows six shows over two thousand people over two thousand people yeah we're supposed to be in san jose and had had five or so shows in a large theater in san jose which unfortunately had to cancel yeah well we had we had sanford's san jose was well was very heavily booked and then we were due to go to san antonio just as the cobit thing and that was almost sold out and that was cancelled so now we mostly do theaters because we haven't i have at the beginning of 20 this year or started in the middle of last year we had we had a new agent who who only books theaters yeah um and um well there's a huge hunger for it oh there is i mean um we did la mirada in um which is a proud 1200 seat theater in in los angeles 1200 seats sold yeah um there is a there's a and a lot of people who like louis or christians a lot of people are willing to go to the theater and see it yeah um and for me um i'm glad when people come to the theater in chicago i forget how many we had there we had over 6 000 people in chicago well plus there are people who are just subscribers to different theaters yeah that's right they like live theater so it's a wonderful opportunity and the agent doesn't go to churches he just but most theaters uh decent-sized theaters have what they call the broadway list and he just markets to the broadway list and that's right and that's the whole point of the cs list society is we we it is outreach so a lot of people just go oh it's a you know it's a play i like going to live performances yeah so it's an opportunity for us to help them know that there's a a deeper magic yeah can come into so it's it's really in your play it's just such a wonderful taste that will make people want to learn more and that's that's the that's the joy i have is you know i i no longer go into a theater wondering whether the audience will enjoy it i don't know they're going to enjoy it right and um and that they they i always said when i started to do theaters i'm people say well is it a christian play and i say no in a way it's not a christian place it's a play about a man who happened to be a christian right exactly that's what the play is about and so when people come along whether they're christians or non-christians i want them to be able to walk out and say well that was worth the money i paid for it yeah well they will do we were so like in your run in san francisco last year we tabled um in the lobby and had books and other material for cs lewis outside and i just the joy of people coming out of the theater the chatter and the just the high energy you could palpable well that's why i keep on doing it you can't you when you when you get an audience reaction like that both at the end of the show and when you talk to people after the show you think well it's worth doing it's amazing what people everybody takes something different away from the play and just imagine how hungry everybody's going to be after we get to leave our homes he's starving for you david that's right you know louis is fairly unique in that he has standing in the secular culture that's right and of course one of his famous uh sayings is he wanted to write in ways to help people sneak past the watchful dragons of the secular world and uh just you know instead of the excuses that people have of uh vanity and narcissism and so forth um and uh i think getting back to what i was asking before which is kind of i think really stunningly amazing is that lewis's work which was in so many different areas as far as his writing but his own life itself was almost a metaphor of uh christian apologetics itself i mean it's a fascinating that's why these films have been done about him and how many how many people of any type are like that not many not no lewis was unique and and of course was a great writer and that's why his work still stands today yeah yeah that's right marvelous so i don't see any more hands-free we really want everybody to appreciate the fact that david is on eastern time so it's now 12 00 30 a.m i thought i might be asleep by now but i managed to stay awake that's right so we and we and you were just so generous to provide us with this edited version of your play that's right can you join us tonight one thing also david is going to be um uh recorded uh for the mike huckabee i could be shown on friday which is shown on monday on the tbn network on saturday and sunday on the tbn network and monday on i think it's the new that new news program use max or something like that oh maybe newsmax okay okay thanks for having me on sunday on on tvn and then uh on newsmax on monday that's great we'll put links on our facebook page too that's right exactly so i want to thank everyone we um uh as time goes on of course the the total number of people with this uh declines but uh i think we had we were up to 140 people or so um and uh for those of you who uh are new or not as far away david if you think you're up late we had someone from england joining us oh really good so um again our website is louis society.org send us a note we're happy to add you to our mailing list we during the year have a book and film club and we do all sorts of other things uh when possible to uh get the word out as far as working with people interested or inspired by lewis and david is a real inspiration um in himself um and i want to really thank david from the bottom of our heart for doing this with us and for all of his work uh and god bless you david and everybody um as we enter the thanksgiving and christmas seasons and the coming new year well i hope you all have a great thanksgiving thank you see you folks

Channel: C. S. Lewis Society of California

Views: 2,629

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Oxford, Christianity, Inklings, Joy Gresham, Joy Davidman, Tolkien, T.S. Eliot, Narnia, Aslan, Fantasy, Mythology, Joy, Hugo Dyson, God, Jane Austen, Religion, Christ, Paganism, Gospel, Faith, Reason, A Grief Observed, Screwtape Letters, Jesus, Bible, Shadowlands, Douglas Gresham, Debra Winger, Lyle Dorsett, Anthony Hopkins, St. Paul, Silmarillion, The Hobbit, Mere Christianity, Til We Have Faces, Heaven, Apologetics, Surprised by Joy, God in the Dock, Kilns, Salvation, Lord of the Rings, Screwtape

Id: 4XaGyytcJW8

Length: 75min 29sec (4529 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 13 2020