Holy Orders: Lantern Theater Company and Anthony Lawton do it for God's sake with The Great Divorce and New Jerusalem

A.D. Amorosi for Philadelphia City Paper
JAN. 26, 2012

Since starting in 1994, Philly's Lantern Theater Company has devoted itself to smartly literate productions. But with its annual run of the Christian-based writings of C.S. Lewis — courtesy thespian Anthony Lawton — and the hasty return of David Ives' Judaic-themed New Jerusalem, there's a theological pattern forming.

How did the Lantern come to focus on philosophical and religious themed theater? Maybe it's that they hold court in the hallowed halls of St. Stephen's Theater (née Church).

Artistic Director Charles McMahon skirts a direct answer to that question with something a teacher once offered him — four fundamental systems for understanding the world: science, philosophy, art and religion. "The great thing about theater is that I don't have to choose," he says. "All fields of investigation and thought are fair game. The greatest drama is that of the human mind struggling to come to grips with those things that lie just beyond the border of comprehension."

The questions are universal and demanding. In Lewis' Great Divorce (and its original adaptation by Lawton) the narrator must choose between the comforts of the bad and the challenges of the good before entering Heaven or Hell. Ives' New Jerusalem — which returns in September — looks at theologian/philosopher Baruch de Spinoza, a Portuguese Jew living in Amsterdam, and his dictums on the infinite nature of the world at a time of personal upheaval and potential excommunication. "I used to obsess over what Spinoza addresses in the play, particularly the question of when I try to think of God, how much am I just looking at myself, at the inside of my own imagination," says McMahon.

He finds that Lewis (through Lawton) is merciless in depicting hypocrisy in action in The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce. "But at the same time forgiving, as if he's holding up a mirror and seeing those faults in himself."

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