The second play in Geva Theater Center’s remarkably varied 40th anniversary season is an impeccably mounted production of a timely, endlessly significant intellectual contest between two important thinkers. Their interaction and debate turns out to be really surprisingly entertaining.
Freud’s Last Session, this play by Mark Germain, grew out of a book written by Dr. Armand M. Nicholi, Jr., “The Question of God: C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and The meaning of Life.” Sounds pedantic? Professor Nicholi’s thesis was that, “There was a young Oxford don who met Freud shortly before his death. Wouldn’t it have been interesting if it were Lewis?”.
Well, in fact, it is a whole lot more than interesting. This format of one or two actors playing iconic characters in a fantasy meeting is rather popular these days. Think of Steve Martin’s play, Picasso at the Lapin Agile, where Pablo Picasso meets Albert Einstein.
Despite its somewhat startling personal exchanges on sex, Freud’s favorite topic, this Session doesn’t rival the sex-talk in my favorite example of the genre, Michael McClure’s The Beard. Jean Harlow & Billy the Kid. But it is set in London in Freud’s study on September 3, 1939, when they could hear bombers overhead, and on the radio the Prime Minister and King announced that Great Britain was at war with Hitler’s Germany, and Freud, aged 83, was 20 days from ending his own life.
I don’t think that C. S. Lewis, the great British apologist for Christianity and the prolific novelist best known for “The Chronicles of Narnia,” was a worthy antagonist as a fairly young Oxford lecturer at 41, though he had already published his masterpiece, “The Allegory of Love.” St. Germain makes him a brash young man who introduces himself to Freud as “Professor Lewis.” But his beliefs are strong, and his growing respect and concern for Freud do not hamper his competitive spirit.
Guthrie Theater actor Ron Menzel makes him less imposing but increasingly ingratiating as he works into the intellectual and emotional rhythm of this encounter and sparring match.
Kenneth Tigar is a veteran actor, director, and writer in all media, who appeared last season in the lead role in On Golden Pond, also directed by Skip Greer. But the credits I found most apropos here are his translations of Franz Wedekind and Bertolt Brecht. Tigar’s Sigmund Freud is so naturally and completely inhabited that one could quarrel only with his interpretation of what that unbelievably complex genius’ character was like; and I don’t get that quarrelsome.
Near the end, a climactic, vividly horrifying demonstration of the terrible cancerous condition of Freud’s mouth is played out by the two actors with such unyielding authority and emotional unity that the more impressionable audience members might have to look away. But the recognition of a splendid effort at curtain call was uniform and unmistakable, and deserves to be repeated throughout the run.
The production is unusually richly detailed. The handsomely designed and furnished set, cluttered with antique relics of all sizes and sorts which Freud had collected is memorably realized by Robert Koharchik and his staff, and lit by Derek Madonia with a complexity that somehow doesn’t call attention to itself.
Ann Emo’s costumes work so well that they actually seem to have been researched, not created. And the best thing about Skip Greer’s subtly right direction is that one hardly notices that it has been planned. The play just happens.
If this were a great play, I think it would make us think more and feel less. But it is intellectually stimulating like a smart debate, transporting in its suggestion of historical detail, and entirely entertaining. I think that all concerned can be proud of Geva’s presentation.
