Arts Alive San Antonio

By JASMINA WELLINGHOFF, Editor

Would you like to spend Christmas with C.S. Lewis?

If you know who he is, you’ll probably say “YES,” a very affirmative “YES.”

Well, the Tobin Center for the Performing Arts is giving you an opportunity to do just that by bringing to town the play, “Christmas with C.S. Lewis” by writer and actor David Payne.

Though a lot of people know Lewis as the author of “The Chronicles of Narnia,” the Irish-born writer, poet and professor, who died in 1963, is also known as a Christian apologist who wrote books about his intellectual journey from atheism to Christianity, the best known of which is “Mere Christianity.” His friend, J.R.R. Tolkien had a lot to do with that transition.

“This play follows on from a play that I’ve been doing for twenty years, which I called ‘An Evening with C.S. Lewis,’” said Payne who also performs in the current one-man show though another actor will play Lewis in San Antonio. “It is about how he, Lewis, viewed Christmas- how he used to view it as a young boy in Northern Ireland, and then as an atheist as a young adult, and how he viewed it when he became a Christian.”

Payne explained that he had been asked by Emery Entertainment to undertake this project. Based in St. Louis, Emery produces and promotes thousands of events around the globe, including a number of theatrical productions. The demand for this play has grown so much since it was created last year that three other actors are also touring with the same show right now, explained Payne.

In the play, we find Lewis at home, near Oxford in England, on Christmas Eve, hosting a group of Americans who are spending the holidays in England. In the course of the evening, the visitors experience “an unforgettable assortment of yuletide recollections which “stimulate curiosity, laughter, gladness and tears,” according to the official description of the show.

A believer himself, Payne has done some research about Lewis’ famed conversion and subsequent writing on the subject.

“Over a period of time he began to question the atheistic philosophy,” explained Payne. “His next step was to say, ‘I believe in God’ but he wasn’t sure what sort of God. Then he met J.R.R. Tolkien and found that Tolkien was a very sincere Christian. And it was Tolkien who helped him recognize not only that God was God but that Jesus Christ was God, too, and that’s when he became a true believer.”

In addition to his intellectual conviction, Lewis also had a transcendental experience, said Payne.

“One time he was riding the bus in Oxford when he saw a door that he either had to go through or reject it. That door meant the acceptance that Jesus was God. And it’s on that night that he became a Christian.”

The play, however, does not focus only on the spiritual awakening of its protagonist. His entire life, from childhood when he lost his mother at age nine, through his studies, war experiences and professional life, are included. And the second act focuses primarily in his relationship with the American writer Joy Davidman, who became his wife and his great late-in-life love. Sadly, she died of cancer just four years after their marriage.

A reviewer commented that “by maintaining a strictly personal approach, inspired by Lewis’s own words, the play refrains from becoming overly preachy. In fact, Lewis asserts that he hates the tendency of his religious readers to hail him as a ‘Christian apologist,’ quipping that a better description would be an ‘apology for a Christian.’”

Another reviewer said that the audience “is spellbound, as, with intimate eloquence and infectious humor, Lewis recounts the significant events and people that shaped his life.”
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(Performances Dec. 8 – Dec. 11; Dec. 8 and 9 at 7:30 p.m.; Dec. 10 at 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.; Dec. 11 at 2 p.m.; Alvarez Theater, Tobin Center for the Performing Arts, 100, Auditorium Circle; tickets start at $65;
tickets@tobincenter.org, 210-223-8624)