Thank you Allied Integrated Marketing for providing us with two tickets to the show!

C.S. Lewis is a well-known author who has penned many great Christian themed works including The Chronicles of Narnia, Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, and plenty more that I have yet to read!  Though he grew up in a Christian household, he did renounce his faith and defended atheism for a while.  The play C.S. Lewis The Most Reluctant Convert is based off of his letters and autobiography, Surprised by Joy.  Max McLean’s performance and retelling of C.S. Lewis’ early life is absolutely brilliant and worth seeing if there’s a performance near you!

The play has a slideshow in the background that would animate and bring forward portraits of people in C.S. Lewis’s life as they were mentioned.  Unfortunately for us, there was a technical malfunction that caused an unplanned intermission and the play was resumed with a still image for the remainder of the performance.  Some of the people talked about were C.S. Lewis’ father, his mentor William T. Kirkpatrick, and his theist friends (Owen Bartfield, J. R. R. Tolkien, Hugo Dyson) that made him question his materialist views.

It was fun seeing C.S. Lewis’ transforming views going from believing that there was no God behind the universe, and if there was it would be an evil God, to acknowledging that the hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men.  Of course C.S. Lewis didn’t dive fully into Christianity, he took many baby steps and slowly gave God the reverence and respect that He deserves.  At first he would only refer to God as “Spirit” stating that He had to earn his title of God.  His prayer life had to grow as well as he first thought prayer was the equivalent of sending letters to a nonexistent address.  

Since this play ends at C.S Lewis’ conversion it begs the question of the possibility of a sequel.  I personally would look forward to it or any other productions from Fellowship For Performing Arts.