A 90-minute play about two men talking through their feelings might not sound particularly gripping—thought-provoking, maybe, but not edge-of-your-seat entertaining. Yet Lewis & Tolkien, showing at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC, through the end of November, is exactly that.
Watching the show is like following a close boxing match, as those old Oxford dons C. S. Lewis (Bo Foxworth) and J. R. R. Tolkien (Arye Gross) go toe to toe. The fictional confrontation—set during a relational rift near the end of their lives—is convincing. The two modern titans of Christian thought might have sparred this way, referencing their past debates and slipping in jests about each other’s work.
They dance from anger to affection, from intellectual theorizing to unburdening their souls, from waxing poetic about fantasy novels to reminiscing on nights spent sitting close enough to the fire to bite the coals in their regular haunt, The Eagle and Child pub. The whole time, they’re gulping pint after pint of imaginary beer (it’s water, really) until, regrettably, Lewis concludes it is time to accept the “lament that comes from seeing the bottom of my upturned mug.”
The conversation is accessible to any theatergoer thanks to pub waitress Veronica (Anna DiGiovanni), a charming audience stand-in. But longtime fans of these writers in particular will find plenty of inside jokes to love. The story is rich, the acting is impressive, and the pacing keeps viewers captivated throughout.
The play also leaves audiences asking earnest questions about their own friendships.
“It’s so much about male friendship,” writer Dean Batali told Christianity Today in an interview shortly before the show’s opening last week. “And I didn’t even know that’s what I was writing at the time.”
That theme feels especially relevant now. Two men reconciling over an unhurried, in-person conversation, nestled in a snug pub, defies everything about modern society’s bitter ideological divisions and disembodied digital distractions. Not a single iPhone in sight. No email notifications. No Slack messages interrupting the conversation. Prolonged eye contact, full attention, and a radical willingness to stay in the same room even when wounded by the other.
Batali said viewers often draw a comparison to their own lives in this fractured age. Sure enough, at the end of the show on opening night, I overheard a man in the audience tell Batali that the conversation had him thinking about Thanksgiving. Which political affiliations or ideas might get someone uninvited from breaking bread (or carving turkey) together?
“The world is infiltrating the church,” that man bemoaned.
Lewis & Tolkien is an ambitious project, with no intermission and a torrent of multisyllabic words for the actors to memorize. It was also a daunting script for Batali to shepherd, given Lewis’s and Tolkien’s fierce admirers. He drew from the men’s books and letters, but he said he’s still a bit nervous about being corrected about some small detail or another, two years after first writing the script.
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The Museum of the Bible has often hosted productions like this one in its World Stage Theater, including a recent Narnia play, which was produced by a different, overtly Christian company. Lewis & Tolkien is a more eclectic undertaking. Batali is a Christian—he told CT he had a sudden, undeniable conversion experience as a teenager and has followed Christ ever since—but the actors didn’t need to pass any theological litmus tests to get the gig, and the show wasn’t intended as an apologetic.
“Was it my purpose to tell the story of C. S. Lewis’s conversion so the people in the theater would hear a conversion story? No,” Batali said. “It came out of the story. And it’s a natural part of the story. Was it my purpose to show two friends reconciling as we’re supposed to, as demonstrated by Jesus? No. That came out of the story too. I’m very excited that it did.”
The show’s director, Andrew Borba, emphasized that anyone should feel welcome to see the play. Borba himself isn’t sure about faith, describing himself as a “seeker” after becoming disillusioned with the Catholic church.
“I apologize to anyone this offends, but there are things not in the practice of Catholicism but the structure of Catholicism that, just, I had to leave,” said Borba, a seasoned actor and director who grew up going to school with Batali in their hometown of Tacoma, Washington. “I found that it was not at all, in my opinion—my very, very faulted and humble opinion—a real practice of Christianity.”
It isn’t lost on Borba and Batali that they are old friends working together on a play about another pair of old friends who likewise shared a relationship centered around ideas and art, one of whom eventually helped push the other into embracing Christ.
“What’s going on with Lewis and Tolkien is not dissimilar to a lot of aspects of our friendship,” Borba told CT. Like Lewis and Tolkien, he reflected, he and Batali have had “many, many times where we would get together for lunch or coffee and talk religion or politics or life, and would, in the very best way, full of love and respect, engage each other.”
If there’s one overarching message to Lewis & Tolkien, it’s that: a celebration of fellowship, even when the way is narrow and the road is hard. But Batali and Borba hope this play will work for both a broader DC audience and visitors to the Museum of the Bible as a story told for the sake of simply telling a good story.
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“I work a lot with new plays,” Borba confided, “and maybe the biggest challenge is that they—almost all of them—come with a strong point of view about life and then pretend to create a discussion or an argument [or] a dramatic event around it. But so clearly the playwright is like, ‘This is right thinking. Here’s my agenda.’”
“Good theater doesn’t do that,” he said. “Good storytelling doesn’t do that. It breathes and opens into the things that matter.”
Borba is convinced Batali’s work does just that. Still, the show’s location at the Museum of the Bible may keep DC’s more liberal theater fans at bay, many of them wary of setting foot in a building associated with conservative Christianity.
But they needn’t worry. The play “doesn’t preach,” Batali said. “It’s just characters expressing what they believe, which might challenge you a little bit, but that’s not the intent.”
“And also, by the way,” he added, “You can get in and out of here without seeing a Bible.”
Batali is used to occupying this in-between space after spending more than 30 years in Hollywood as both a Christian and a writer. He wrote for That ’70s Show and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, among other productions.
He recalled once pitching a story line where Buffy teams up with the local Christian youth group. It didn’t make the cut, although he did manage to write a conversation about God into That ’70s Show.
“They happened to be high at the time,” he noted. “But.”
Batali told CT he often faces pushback from Christians who are suspicious of the art world.
“Christians need to open their minds to what stories do,” he said. “‘In the world, not of it,’ … but we still have to engage culture.” After 35 years making that argument, Batali still feels that the church is “playing catch-up,” which is why it’s “so satisfying to be here in a theater with 490 seats, with a professional director and actors with years of experience.”
The play does come across as professional. The primary danger in seeing it, more so than being around uncomfortable ideas, is the extreme longing afterward to find a similar pub nearby where one’s own friends can gather for hours by a cozy fire.
Even if I find a suitable venue, cell phones will still exist. And my friends and I haven’t spent nearly enough time translating Beowulf to enjoy the same caliber of conversation.
I’ll have to cherish the memory of this play, in the meantime, and the genuine affection it displayed for two writers I adore.
“You kind of lean forward, listening to them,” Batali said of the dialogue. “They enjoy language.”
Language, yes. And for Tolkien and Lewis, quite a few pints too.
Haley Byrd Wilt is a writer based in Washington, DC.
