The announcement that “Freud’s Last Session” was leaving the Upper West Side for Midtown gave me a guilty conscience. I thought I should see the show before it departs its natural habitat; there are surely more psychoanalysts on the Upper West Side than anywhere else on earth — in any case, certainly more than in Midtown.
The 80-minute, two-character play, which began performances at the Marjorie S. Deane Theater in the West Side YMCA in July, 2010, will end there on October 2, and then open on October 7 at New World Stages, home to some five other shows, including Broadway refugees “Avenue Q,” “Million Dollar Quartet,” and “Rent.”
“Freud’s Last Session” is a surprise in several ways. One surprise is that it is not about Sigmund Freud’s last session with a patient, and it is not about psychoanalysis. It is essentially a debate about religion. Playwright Mark St. Germain imagines a meeting between the father of psychoanalysis and the Christian writer C.S. Lewis. (It is possible that they actually met, but there is no clear record of this, and it is unlikely.) St. Germain has imagined some interesting pairings before – Henry Ford and Thomas Edison (and Warren G. Harding!) in “Camping with Henry and Tom”; John Lennon with FBI agents conducting surveillance in “Ears on a Beatle.”
This one is set in 1939 on the eve of war between England and Germany (we get this because they keep on turning on the radio to hear the British prime minister speak); this is three weeks before Freud committed suicide at age 83 to end his suffering from cancer. The dying father of psychoanalysis has invited the young Oxford professor “to learn why a man of your intellect, one who shared my convictions, could suddenly abandon truth
and embrace an insidious lie” — in other words, why a former atheist has become religious
To my mind, the set-up threatens to reduce a great scientific innovator by focusing on the least influential of his views. It would be hard to argue, however, that such theological discussions are no longer relevant to modern life; one need only watch one of the GOP presidential debates to be disabused of that conviction. And the playwright handles the encounter adroitly, aided by understated and persuasive performances by Martin Rayner as Freud and Mark. H. Dold as Lewis, who are treated as equals, and a striking set by Brian Prather (which I hope they leave intact) recreating Freud’s study in London (which was a recreation of the study in Vienna that he was forced to flee.) The back-and-forth is not arid, though there is not much in the way of honest dramatic tension. Still, there are plenty of jokes, and some informative tidbits. Freud collected antiquities, amassing some 2,000 pieces many of them thousands of years old, which prompts one of the many pointed exchanges in the play:
LEWIS: What I’d like to know is why all the pieces on your desk are sacred objects?
FREUD: Tell me; are you hoping to replace me in my practice? I am simply interested in ancient belief systems. Yours included.
The biggest surprise of “Freud’s Last Session” may be that a modest imagined debate between two dead intellectuals could be popular enough to take its place alongside “Naked Boys Singing.”
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Jonathan Mandell
Jonathan Mandell, who tweets as New York Theater, is a native New Yorker and third-generation journalist with diverse experience on newspapers, magazines and websites.He has ...
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