JOURNEY TV. A CONVERSATION WITH MAX MCLEAN

Excerpts from show (complete transcription will be available later this week)

T Carnes

Hello, Journeyers!

I’m Tony Carnes, your host for this journey through New York City’s religions. This morning we have a conversation with Max McLean, an actor widely known for his rich voice in the podcast “Listeners Bible,” and inspiring dramatizations of CS Lewis’s books. The Wall Street Journal has called his stage presentation of CS lewis’s The Screwtape  Letters, “wickedly witty, one hell of a show!” The New York Times has called his current play CS Lewis’s The Great Divorce, “instantly thought-provoking, consistently intriguing.”

As an avid dramatic producer, Max McLean is also the founder of the Fellowship for the Performing Arts.

This November 3rd will mark the debut of the full-length movie on the spiritual transformation of CS Lewis, the author of the Narnia tales. Max wrote the dramatic play upon which the movie script is based, and plays a mature CS Lewis looking back upon his journey to conversion to Christianity. Welcome to the show, Max.

Max McLean 

Thank you, Tony. Good to be with you.

T Carnes 

Max, I understand that New York City happens to be your residence.

Max McLean 

It is.

T Carnes 

Is it your favorite city?

Max McLean 

Well, as you know, it’s a wounded city now. But at its peak, when it’s doing what it does, there’s no city in the world like it.

T Carnes 

So many wonderful things have happened to you here before the pandemic.

I I feel like putting on a play in New York City is very different from putting on a play anyplace else. Is that what you find?

Max McLean 

I think that’s true. I mean, you know, here in New York, you have world-class artists, world class theatre companies coming together, producing the kind of world-class art that gets created here and, and gets exported around the country and around the world. And so being in New York really makes us step up our game.

T Carnes 

Lewis is a Christian apologist. He didn’t start that way, of course. He started as a scholar with a very materialistic view. And then through a series of dramatic moments and personalities that he met, he became a Christian. But today, he’s often known as an apologist, an evangelist for the Christian faith.

How is he received in New York differently than other places in the country and also in England where you’ve performed

Max McLean 

Well surprisingly, the show ran in New York for 15 weeks, a one-person show about a religious conversion. I like conversion stories because “once I was this but I then became that” is about change. It is about a conflict that produces change. And Lewis personifies the kind of religious conversation about spiritual life that a lot of smart artistic well-read people can relate to.

So, I do think that people that are interested in the topic. In theater. people self-select what they’re interested in. Some people just like musicals other people like comedies, but other people really want to have a, a serious conversation. They like a well-told story about a serious conversation that has to do with religion.

I do think that New York was a really good place to launch “The Most Reluctant Convert. The Untold Story of C.S. Lewis.”

T Carnes 

I recently had the experience of watching your new movie, “The Most Reluctant Convert. The Untold Story of C.S. Lewis. I really like how you start with the behind-the-scenes preparations for shooting the movie, and then, you exit through a private door to the reality of Lewis’s life. It’s a wonderful introduction.

As you transform into Lewis, your literary alliterative introduction to his belief at that time, that the universe was empty of any meeting and that humans are destined to the cosmic garbage heap, is just stunningly beautiful. And, of course, tragic at the same time.

Max McLean

Well, that was Lewis’s belief system. He had lost his mother to cancer. He had a terrible relationship with his father. He was in the trenches during the Great War, World War 1, which he described as seeing horribly smash men that look like crushed beetles. And so, his experience of suffering and evil gave him the conclusion that either there’s no God behind the universe, or a God indifferent to good and evil, or worse, an evil God. And he couldn’t come to terms with the world being made by a wise and good creator, because that wasn’t his experience.

T Carnes 

Now I’m wondering, and I’m sure audiences will wonder, that you’re the playwright for the theatrical drama. You have all types of activity in this movie, both behind the scenes, but also as the narrator as the mature Lewis reflecting on his life. How deeply are you affected? You’ve played a lot of in the Lewis plays, how deeply are you attached to CS Lewis?

Max McLean

Well, he’s become my spiritual guide,

I was converted as an adult in my 20s. And so was Lewis; I think he was 32 when he finally committed to Jesus Christ, though he probably committed to real monotheism, what he calls the God of the Jews. Not that he was Jewish, but he understood that there was one personal God. I think he finally understood God as a personal God during the Trinity term of 1929. He said,  “I gave in and admitted that God is God,” knelt and prayed, perhaps the most reluctant convert in all England. So, his experience as going from atheism to Christianity has always been helpful to me.

He always knew where the landmines were. And he always knew where the important questions were. God came from someplace else and entered into our created world, and came out again, bringing us with him.

And you know, he says, either you believe that that’s what the Christian believes. Or you believe that he was a lunatic on the level of a poached egg, or he’s telling lies from the devil of hell. And he says, unless you believe that–and I can’t, he said, you turn to the Christian story. And so then, that opens the door. And then once he gets in the door, he finds this element of desire. If I find in myself a desire, that no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is I was made for another world.

T Carnes 

You suggest that this desire, maybe, went all the way back to his childhood. Toward the end of the movie, you cover his interaction with some famous personalities, arguing about God and Jesus and all of that. But then, you reflect back that he had felt something unusually touching himself, when his young brother as a kid, brought him a model of a garden to look at. And he comes in his hands with this toy garden. It hasa white flower, and it’s beautiful. The movie suggests that Lewis at that moment in childhood felt something different. Is that what you’re saying, and what did he feel there?

Max McLean 

These are elements of a deep desire that no experience in this world could satisfy.

He recalled that experience of his brother’s biscuit tin of moss and twigs and flower to make a toy garden. He said it was the first beauty he had ever known. It was a feeling of enormous bliss. And it was a sensation of desire. But before he knew what he desired, it was gone. And he called that joy.

And he thought joy is not to be confused with happiness or pleasure, except that anyone who’s ever tasted joy will want it again. He said, it’s almost like grief, but the kind of grief we want. And so that was a kind of the pointer that there’s something beyond this world. And of course, after Lewis’s conversion, he said that he didn’t think that, that earthly pleasures were ever meant to satisfy this desire but were only to arouse it. And so thus he made it his duty to press on to that other country and to help others do the same.

[here the transcription is still in process]

T Carnes 

What you’re doing is you’re trying to write God and CS Lewis into a conversation within peoples’ lives through this movie.

It is a wonderfully shot film. The script is terrific. It has this snapping and energy. Your portrayal of Lewis is nothing less than making us feel that he standing right next to us. I would think that anybody should just run to go see this movie.

Tell us a little bit about when it’s opening and how can they get tickets?

Max McLean 

On November 3, we will be nationwide in over 300 theaters nationwide–AMC Regal. And we are adding more theaters every day. You can look up where to see it by going to the website CSLewismovie.com before November 3.

T Carnes 

Well, I think that this is a great opportunity, during this pandemic, period to have some meaning and life and joy.

Thank you very much for being with us, Max.

I’m Tony Carnes, your host for A Journey through NYC religions Television.

Max McLean is an award-winning actor and founder and artistic director of the New York City-based Fellowship for Performing Arts. FPA produces theatre and film from a Christian worldview meant to engage diverse audiences.

FPA produced and Max stars in the upcoming film The Most Reluctant Convert: The Untold Story of C.S. Lewis premiering nationwide Nov. 3

Recent FPA productions in New York City include The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis Onstage: The Most Reluctant Convert. Each was either adapted for the stage or written by Max McLean. Other New York productions include Paradise Lost, Shadowlands, A Man for All Seasons, and Martin Luther on Trial.

As an actor, Max created the roles of Screwtape (New York, London, national tour), C.S. Lewis in The Most Reluctant Convert (New York, national tour), and Mark in Mark’s Gospel for which he received a Jeff Award – Chicago theatre’s highest honor. 

Max’s work has been cited in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, CNN, The Guardian, and The Boston Globe among many others. 

His narration of The Listener’s Bible published by HarperCollins and Biblica has received four Audie Award nominations from the Audio Publishers Association.