Sometimes the most dramatic stories told inside a theater do not take place on stage. That's certainly the case with the opening of “The Great Divorce” at Taproot in Greenwood. Just over three months ago an arsonist set a fire that destroyed four businesses next door and caused devastating smoke and water damage to the theater. That's when the Taproot organization (and a theater is much more than a place where plays are performed) showed its real character and importance to its patrons and to the neighborhood.

With the extraordinary effort and dedication of the staff, the insurance agents and the workers who put everything back together piece by piece, on Friday the 29th the lights came up on a new production. As Producing Artistic Director Scott Nolte took the stage, along with Assistant Fire Chief A.D. Vickery, and Steve Timian, the foreman of the reconstruction crew, the audience rose to its feet for an extended, enthusiastic ovation. The re-opened theater has set an all-time record for season subscriptions, this performance was sold-out, and I don't think I've ever had a stronger sense that everyone in that space felt that what was happening there belonged to them. A mere play has a tough time competing with that sort of dramatic authenticity.

The play, a theatricalization by George Drance and the Magis Theatre of an intellectually dense and theologically earnest fantasia by C.S. Lewis, is exactly the sort of serious-minded and professionally performed work that is Taproot's hallmark. Unfortunately, the strength and depth of the ideas do not translate into equivalently strong drama. This is a play in prose, and its expository nature leaves too much of the action nothing more than characters who are mouthpieces for the author walking the stage speaking his writing. I think this is a play that reads better than it plays, and that's always a problem. 

The cast was certainly competent. David Dorrian plays Lewis with an understated decency, intelligence and dignity that felt just right for an academic whose ivory tower contains vast spiritual kingdoms. On his arrival with a bus full of fellow travelers in the “Gray City” which is a Hell on the lowlands beneath the mountains of Heaven, he discovers that he and all those with him are insubstantial, ghosts whose contact with reality, with the grasses beneath their feet, is painful and tormenting. They are met by Spirits who have accepted the Truth and attempt to convince the ghosts to move on to eternal happiness. One by one they choose to return to the familiarity of the insubstantial rather than assume the integrity that would allow them to enter into Heaven. Lewis has the Scottish fantasy writer George MacDonald (strongly played by Nolan Palmer) as his guide, acting both to introduce and clarify the individuals and their choices. All of the players except Dorrian play multiple roles and they are well-drawn and distinctive. The staging is fluid and the physical production attractive and imaginative, but ultimately this meditation on the After-Life never really comes to life. 

I think Lewis largely argues in this work that the fundamental choice of free will is whether or not to believe in a universal power greater than individual will. It is a compelling argument, but one voiced in this play in discourse rather than in action. That Lewis acknowledges in the end that this has all been a dream only makes it feel less vital, less immediate than the stage and his own intellectual urgency requires. 

I really wish I could have loved and admired this production as much as I love and admire this theater company. I am so happy to see them up and running, more enthused, more committed, more impassioned than ever by the belief in their mission. This really is a resurrection of the Theatre of Belief more convincing than any single production. 

PICTURED ABOVE: Nolan Palmer and David Dorrian (left to right) in The Great Divorce.
PHOTO BY: Erik Stuhaug.