Max McLean and Karen Eleanor Wight have a devil of a time in C. S. Lewis’s THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS
Westside Theatre
407 West 43rd St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Tickets: $69-$95
www.fpatheatre.com/screwtape
Clive Staples Lewis was a staunch Christian apologist in such parables as the Chronicles of Narnia and the Space Trilogy. In 1942 he published THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS, an epistolary novel about the battle between heavenly good and eternal damnation. In 2008, Max McLean and Jeffrey Fiske adapted the short work for the stage, and after successful runs in Washington, DC, Chicago, San Francisco, and other cities, it is now playing at the Westside Theatre on 43rd St. McLean stars as His Abysmal Sublimity Screwtape, a well-dressed demon who is exchanging letters with his nephew, Wormwood, as they discuss the ultimate fate of an unnamed “patient” whom Screwtape is preparing a special place for in hell. In his underworld office — Cameron Anderson’s superbly designed slightly elevated and slanted rhombus with one ladder going up and another leading down, as well as a funny pneumatic tube that sends and receives the letters — Screwtape dictates to his minion, Toadpipe (Karen Eleanor Wight), a demonic Harley Quinn who creeps around on all fours and never speaks, instead emitting strange sounds. Although McLean, who also codirects with Fiske, clearly delights in the role, he overplays the part, coming off as too buffoonish (hammier than thou), especially when he continually pops the “p” at the end of his name as he verbally signs off each missive. Although the letters contain occasional witty lines and clever wordplay, they get lost in repetition and didacticism, and McLean inexplicably takes pauses at the wrong parts of sentences. The play does contain pleasurable, insightful moments, but just not enough of them, which is perhaps why it’s not exactly filling the small theater; in fact, on the night we attended, it was rather annoying as people jockeyed for different seats and the ushers tried to move everyone around because of all the empty rows. The walk-in music, however, was excellent, several Bob Dylan songs about good and evil (“Gotta Serve Somebody,” “Man Gave Names to All the Animals”) as well as the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil.”