Speakeasy with - Tom Key

For three decades, Atlanta actor, playwright and Theatrical Outfit artistic director Tom Key has (periodically) taken on the alter ego of C.S. Lewis, the popular English theologian and author of the Narnia books. For the 31st year, Key brings back his self-written one-man show C.S. Lewis On Stage at Theatrical Outfit (opening Wednesday, Jan. 9, and running through Jan. 20), to convey the personality, poetry and conversion experience of the writer known for “Mere Christianity.”

What inspired you to write and perform in a one-man show about C.S. Lewis? I was commissioned to do it in 1977. At the time I was the artistic director of the Birmingham Children’s Theatre, and I had just seen my first one-person show, Julie Harris playing Emily Dickinson in The Belle of Amherst. A woman wanted me to do a public reading of C.S. Lewis’ poems, and I suggested doing a one-man show as Lewis, with his poetry punctuating the script, like the songs in a musical. It got such a positive reception that in the late 1970s I performed it almost full time. One year I did 100 productions in 30 states.

Has the script changed much over time? I have tinkered with it, especially in the first two years, based on the audience’s response. I never wanted to include Narnia because it’s so familiar. I wanted to track the evolution of his thought and character, and give the audience a chance to meet the person whose imagination created Narnia and Screwtape. Recently I added some of his passages from Surprised By Joy, because my ability to understand what Lewis meant about joy is so much more comprehensive now than when I was in my 20s – like the inexhaustible nature of joy compared to the fleeting nature of pleasure.

During the show you also play Screwtape, a senior devil advising younger demons on how to lead human beings astray. Is it fun to play the devil? Lewis wrote that he eventually felt like he had to put Screwtape away, because it was getting too easy to think like the devil. It’s always more fun to play the bad guy than the good guy – it almost feels like you’re getting away with something, but it’s OK. It may be fun to do because it’s a way for you to get the last laugh at the bad guy’s expense.

There’s been a lot of tension between secular and devout people in American culture this decade. How does C.S. Lewis speak to that? I have felt in a way that, politically, my faith has been taken hostage for political purposes. Since the 2000 election, I’ve inserted in the show a passage in which Screwtape teaches a younger devil how to win the soul of a man who’s just converted to Christianity. This is during World War II, and Screwtape says, “We need to attach his Christianity to a worldly cause – either patriotism or pacifism, it doesn’t matter which – and then we’ve got him back to Hell.” People will say, “You made up that part, right?” No, it’s right there in The Screwtape Letters. C.S. Lewis wasn’t telling people how to vote, but he told them what he thought of Jesus’ teachings, and let them sort it out. Lewis experienced the gamut of realities of human life, so he reaches out to very broad audiences. This is a man who was in combat in World War I. He doesn’t just touch the smoking-jacket crowd.