SHADOWLANDS
at Urbus Orbis
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Nicholson deftly contrasts Lewis’s donnish life–surrounded by vaguely misogynistic pedants and living with “Warnie,” his crusty bachelor brother–with the new life Joy offers. She enters Lewis’s stuffy, tweedy world initially as a passionate correspondent who shakes him with her forthright questions: “Is it better to be the enchanted child or the magician who casts the spell?” Seventeen years Lewis’s junior, Joy proves even more invigorating when he meets her and her Narnia-loving son, Douglas, in an Oxford tearoom. Perceptive and direct, Joy is an original and a free spirit, an American woman on the verge of divorce whose taste for T.S. Eliot and egalitarianism helps, as Lewis says, to “drag me into the 20th century.”
Then, as if God were jealous of their three years of unexpected happiness, Joy develops bone cancer. But despite the agony of a terminal illness, she never loses her humor: “I’m a Jew, broke, divorced, and I’m dying of cancer–do I get a discount?” Testing their love as many years together could not, their pain seems proof to Joy and Lewis of a future happiness after death. Still their life remains, as an uncharacteristically inarticulate Lewis puts it, a “mess.” Exhausted, he has no answers for Douglas when the boy asks why his mother is sick. Lewis’s one recourse, as in the Narnia fantasies, is magic: in death Joy will be his strongest link to life.
Literature needn’t be computer-generated to address contemporary problems. Among those who have argued for classes in music, art, poetry, and drama was–yes!–Charles Dickens. Hard Times, published in 1854, is a trenchant, eloquent attack on the soul-shrinking effects of the sort of cold-blooded utilitarianism preached by “dismal scientists” Bentham and Malthus and supported now by Pate Philip and his bottom-line cheapos.
In another exhibition of remarkable range David James depicts both spineless Tom Gradgrind and his chief victim, the soft-spoken, much-persecuted weaver Stephen Blackpool. Donalee Henne makes much of Louisa’s almost operatic repudiation of her father’s heartless pragmatism (“I have never had a child’s heart!”). Bruce Vieira, who also directs, easily stretches from the humorless but redeemable Gradgrind to Harthouse, the bored bounder who seduces Louisa. Unfortunately the former role hasn’t yet jelled: if Vieira could suggest Gradgrind’s pedagogical insecurity, his change of heart would be more believable.
