Freud's Last Session

Mark St. Germaine's two character play, "Freud's Last Session," was a big hit on Broadway.  This is not surprising:  the play trivializes both Sigmund Freud's theory of psychoanalysis, for all my life the whipping boy of pseudo-intellectuals, and Christianity, a belief system, more or less, discredited by those same pseudo-intellectuals.  The show manages to make both Freud, and his interlocutor, C. S. Lewis, as a priggish representative of Christianity, seem equally offensive, irritating, and pretentious.  When these two men debate, you wish them both to lose.  This is a curious effect for a play to achieve -- you keep expecting that you will sympathize with one of the two characters and begin to take his side in the war of words; but, in fact, the audience ends up disliking both the Christian and the cerebral Man of Science equally.  The play depicts Freud suffering greatly from oral cancer, three weeks before his death by suicide.  The psychoanalyst has invited C. S. Lewis to his chambers for a (fictional) colloquy about faith and reason.  St. Germaine amps up the rather pallid rhetorical exchanges between the two men by staging the debate on the day that Hitler has invaded Poland -- the same day that Great Britain has declared war against Germany.  From time-to-time, air raid sirens wail and the two protagonists cower, fumbling with gas masks.  (Lewis, apparently, a veteran of World War One, suffers from shell-shock or what we would now call post-traumatic stress syndrome.)  The debate about reason and faith is conducted in harsh ad hominem terms; there is something unrealistically stark and brutal about much of the argument between the two men -- they don't treat one another with much respect and tend to make their points in a bullying way.  Freud, of course, wasn't much interested in religion and his essays on that subject are basically off-the-cuff speculation and, so, in my view, the show falsifies his thinking by turning Freud into a sort of Dawkins or Dennett or Christopher Hitchens; he is presented as a cartoonish figure:  the village atheist with a Yiddish accent.  Similarly, the Lewis is shown to be a vulgar proselytizing kind of Christian, not much different from a Mormon missionary -- he smugly abuses Freud for contemplating suicide as a way to escape the unremitting pain caused by the prosthesis (Freud calls it "the monster") cutting into his jaw.  Everything about the play is fundamentally superficial -- one example will suffice for many:  at one point, after an air-raid siren has sounded, Freud insults Lewis about "turning the other cheek" in the face of Hitler's aggression.  Freud's point is a good one and a direct challenge to Lewis' Christianity -- after all, Christianity is pacifist and ill-tailored to the "blood, sweat, and tears" of perpetual warfare that Churchill will urge in opposition to the Nazis.  So how will Lewis respond to this powerful and important challenge to his "mere Christianity?"  The answer is disconcerting -- he doesn't:  the play just raises the issue to dismiss it and changes the subject.  This is indicative of what is wrong with this show.  It raises important and challenging issues, only to abandon any consideration of them.  (The show is also unduly literal about Freud's suffering -- there is an extended scene in which Freud bellows with pain as Lewis struggles to yank the bloody prosthesis out of his mouth; this is grotesque and awful to see and poses the same problem for viewers as dramatized sex -- that is, faking an orgasm and faking pain...in both cases, the audience is embarrassed for the actors charged with this onerous task.)  I saw the show at East Dennis, Massachusetts at the Cape Playhouse, a big barnlike town meeting hall, built by whalers like a whaling boat, and tremendously uncomfortable -- the hard pews were savage on the buttocks and the seats were crammed together with the brutal efficiency of Shakespeare's Globe Theater -- a structure built when asses were only 12 inches wide.  The audience was happy, half-drunk, geriatric -- old people were bussed in from a local nursing home, the Thirlwell House.  At the 2:00 pm matinee, I saw the show with retired Jewish educators and widows, people so old that they regarded Julie and I as mere youths.  The production featured a perfect reproduction of Freud's office both in London and 17 Berggasse in Wien, both places that I have visited, and the acting was beyond reproach -- in fact, Freud was played by a distinguished Broadway actor and his work was superb.