FREUD’S LAST SESSION

I’d thought the last time I saw Freud’s Last Session would be the last time I saw it. But I felt compelled to go again. The verbal duel between psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (Martin Rayner) and the rising writer and academic, C.S. Lewis (Mark H. Dold) is something you could see and hear again and again without tiring of it.

It begins with Freud calling Lewis to his study. Lewis thinks he’s going to catch hell for satirizing Freud in his recent book. Instead, on the day England enters World War II, Freud and Lewis argue over the existence of God, of love, and sex, and life, each sometimes ending up on the famed couch. It’s two weeks after Freud, an avowed atheist, has decided to take his own life. We see his horrible suffering from the cancer that’s eating away at his jaw. But C.S. Lewis, who has recently had a conversion experience as swift and life-changing as the Apostle Paul’s, tries to talk him out of it.

Directed by Tyler Marchant and written by Mark St. Germain, Freud’s Last Session, was based on the question that came up in the book, The Question of God, when the author, Dr. Armond M. Nicholi, Jr. wrote “Did Freud and Lewis ever meet?”

  Every time I thought Freud’s Last Session had its last run, it opened again, this time at New World Stages (340 West 50^th Street). It won the 2011 Off Broadway Alliance Award for Best Play.

Tickets are available at Telecharge.com 212-239-6200 or through www.FreudsLastSession.com. A limited number of $21.50 Student Rush tickets (cash only, with valid student ID) are available at the box office beginning three hours prior to each performance.