Last Saturday was “my” day, and it was quite mellow, with a long run in the morning and then my taking a nap while Mer got groceries. We puttered around home until evening, when we headed to Cleveland; I’m glad we left early, because Cleveland has the main highway we usually take closed for construction, and the detour signs were unhelpfully spaced far apart. We did eventually get to Playhouse Square, but it was about 25 minutes later than we normally would have gotten there.

Playhouse Square is a complex of theaters, and the place was packed. Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat was playing in another theater, and it must have been quite the draw. We were there to see C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce as a play, and our theater was about 90% sold out. The play was being done by The Fellowship for the Performing Arts, the same group who did a great job of staging The Screwtape Letters. The Great Divorce, which is a fictional account of a bus ride from Hell to the gates of Heaven, seemed to me like a difficult book to stage, so I was looking forward to it.

The production was fantastic. Three actors played nineteen different roles, including all three at various times playing the narrator , who was portrayed as C.S. Lewis himself. Each actor made each character different with different styles of speaking, body language, and such. It was very well done. Many of the most difficult transitions in the play (like the bus ride) were done abstractly with projections and lighting. It worked well and did not seem showy to me.

The play ran about ninety minutes with no intermission, and I never got restless. Mer and I lucked into front row seats through a quirk of Ticketmaster – the service would not let people break up a grouping of three seats in the front row for some reason, but a service representative at Playhouse Square was quite happy to do so when I called in my order. Hooray for older technology! Anyway, the play paced itself well, and we had great seats. We both came away form the play quite impressed.

There was a short talk-back after the show from Max Maclean, the producer of the play. I also had a very brief chat with the guy who ran lights and projections for the show, so we got to find out a little bit about the behind the scenes. Max’s talk conveyed how difficult the process of staging was, as it sounds as if it took about two years and several test productions to get the play cut down to where it played well to audiences. Good stuff.