Telling a love story through faith and grief

"Shadowlands" is that rarity — a play about language and literary inspiration that also tells a love story.

It's a balancing act, one well suited to Broadway legend Martin Charnin, who directs the play for Village Theatre. It runs through March 18 at the Everett Performing Arts Center.

"You can't ask actors to play abstractions," Charnin says. "They have to play the truth — and truth is not abstract.

"The thing that I learned a very long time ago was that lighting a match on stage and seeing it flicker can be as thrilling as the chariot race in 'Ben-Hur,' " said Charnin. "And that's why the theater is so extraordinary. It goes back to the beginning of time."

"Shadowlands" concerns C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), who was both an academic and a literary celebrity.

The Oxford scholar was a Christian theologian but also a spinner of fantasy novels, and like his friend J.R.R. Tolkien, he achieved great success, most notably in the "The Chronicles of Narnia" series.

But dormant feelings become real to Lewis when a woman and her son come into his life.

Lewis (played by Dan Kremer) and his brother Warren (Clark Sandford) lost their mother, Flora, when they were very young, a loss that was "the end of the world," C.S. Lewis said. So he keeps women at an arm's length.

But then comes Joy.

Joy Gresham (Shelly Burch), an American poet who writes him letters — unusual, uninhibited letters.

When she comes to England with her son Douglas, estranged from her promiscuous, alcoholic husband, it presents Lewis with a quandary.

Here are basic needs from a real person, not abstract ideas. How will he respond?

In one of those great leaps of impulse that can take your breath away, you see his mind turning over her dilemma. All his abstract principles are put to the test.

By the first afternoon, they are not Mr. Lewis and Mrs. Gresham; they are Jack and Joy.

"She's got her hooks into you," says his friend Christopher (Mark Chamberlin) when Joy spends Christmas with Lewis.

Charnin directs his wife in the role of Joy, a vivid, beautiful woman who even dares to criticize her host country.

"How do you find England?" she's asked.

"Cold, dull," she replies. "And I don't care much for the weather, either."

Joy finds in Lewis a combination spiritual mentor, father confessor — and something more. A great and decent man, with whom she finds safe shelter.

"I love you," she says. "Do you mind?"

Their love story takes the audience on a journey — ennobling, tragic and full of good, honest tears. Ultimately, it is about the power of faith and prayer in the conquest of grief — reducing past emotions to their tiniest residue in order to be open to the coming of life and love again.

"I started living when I started loving you, Joy," says Lewis.

With a masterful cast, Charnin is able to cut to the heart of the play. The award-winning Broadway lyricist and director shows the same meticulous approach to a nonmusical play that he has taken over the years to such classics as "Annie."

Charnin says he did not want the play to be a lecture on theology. But he did want it to be thought-provoking, even to send people into bookstores and libraries to investigate Lewis' life and work. Charnin had read the Narnia books, as well as Lewis' humorous debate with the devil, "The Screwtape Letters," and even "A Grief Observed," Lewis' own account of his marriage to Joy.

"If you really examine Narnia, it's very much an allegorical piece about God and the devil," said Charnin. "Lewis was a theologian who wrote about God's relationship to man and man's to God.

"I don't think that any writer worth his salt writes in human vacuum in which characters are formed into thin air," he said. "Somewhere there are personal experiences as to what people put on paper."

Just as with the musical "Annie," the tricky part, he said, was "to make those characters and those feelings real, as opposed to those two-dimensional drawings.

"It's always a question of knowing how to flesh something out — and how to stop."

Diane Wright: 425-745-7815 or dwright@seattletimes.com