‘Lewis & Tolkien’ play coming to Cedar Rapids

A midlife crisis 25 years ago opened the door to a wardrobe for which David Payne is well suited.

Payne, now 80, had never stepped foot onstage until he played author C.S. Lewis in “Shadowlands” in Nashville at age 55. He began his career in structural engineering, but felt drawn to the business side of the music industry, and with two partners, established an entertainment company offering a recording label, event promotion, publishing and artist management.

Commissioned for a two-year project consulting with a British religious music company that wanted to set up in Nashville, he moved there in the mid-1990s, and at the end of his stint, he spied auditions for a community theater production about Lewis and his wife, Joy. The stipulation: The show would require British accents.

“I thought, well, I’ve got a British accent. I’ve had it for a long time.’ ”

Thinking he might get a bit part, imagine his surprise when he was cast in the lead role. And on opening night, Lewis’ stepson, Douglas Gresham, sat front and center for the show.

“Being the marketing man, I had talked to Doug,” he said. “Somebody had given me his contact (information).”

The opening would be a St. Jude’s charity night, so after Payne told him about the show, he asked Gresham what he was doing that night. “He said, ‘I’m not doing anything.’ So I said, ‘Why don’t you and your wife come over and be our special guests for the gala performance?’ And he agreed.”

Payne earned high praise from Gresham, who said his performance was better than the actor who portrayed Lewis onstage in London’s West End, which is like the British Broadway.

“And Douglas gave me a big endorsement when I started to do my one-man show,” titled “An Evening with C.S. Lewis.”

In Cedar Rapids

Payne has been playing Lewis ever since, and with Welsh actor Gregory Williams, the two will be coming to the Paramount Theatre in Cedar Rapids on Oct. 15 with Payne’s play “Lewis & Tolkien.”

The two literary giants — Clive Staples Lewis of “Narnia” fame and John Ronald Reuel Tolkien of “The Lord of the Rings” fame — are meeting for one final evening at The Eagle and Child pub in Oxford, England. Longtime friends, they call each other by their inner circle nicknames: Jack for Lewis, a name he reportedly adopted at age 4 after his beloved dog, Jacksie, was killed by a car; and Tollers for Tolkien.

“They’re near the end of their lives,” Payne said via Zoom interview from the home he shares with his wife, Ruth, in Hailsham, about 2 1/2 hours southeast of London, near the English Channel coast.

“Lewis has just had a heart attack, and he actually recovered from it — they didn’t expect him to. … Their friendship had cooled over the years, but when Lewis died, Tollers writes this beautiful essay, and I wanted to capture that,” playwright Payne said.

“So I put (the play) at the end of their life, when Tollers, knowing Lewis is probably not long for this earth, invites him to the last meeting they ever had. So that’s the setting — they come together.

"They’re reminiscing, looking back at the past. It gets into something about what others say about why they wrote the books (and) what they say about why they wrote the books — that sort of thing.

“And they deal with two of the very difficult times in their lives — one where Lewis upset Tolkien and one where Tolkien upset Lewis. Those incidents were far apart, but we put them together in the play.”

The show takes viewers on an emotional ride.

“It’s up and down. You’ll laugh (and) I’ve had people cry in the play, because of its very tender scene at the end,” Payne said. “You'll find out things about both of them that you never knew before. You’ll hear what Lewis thought about ‘The Lord of the Rings’ trilogy and what Tolkien thought about the ‘Narnia’ books, and some people are going to be very surprised.

“You’ve got this lovely banter between them, and they’re reminiscing, as well. So it’s just an intriguing look at two friends, and in many ways, it’s a celebration of friendship. Tollers starts the whole show off by saying, ‘Where would we be without friends?’ ”

When asked how long Payne spent writing the play, he replied that he doesn’t consider the script to be finished.

“I want to be facetious and say (it took) 20 years,” he said, adding that in reality, the main draft took about six months. “It has changed over the years. People sometimes ask me who directed it, and I say, ‘Well, I did half the direction, and the audience has done the rest.’ In terms of live audience, I’ve had well over 100,000 directors.”

Payne views the proliferation of movies and television shows about the two authors’ works as good publicity for his various C.S. Lewis plays.

“The whole thing keeps growing, and I keep thinking, ‘Excellent.’ For as long as I'm doing it, they’re doing great publicity, and I can benefit from it,” he said.

The authors also deserve to live onstage.

“I think the people like Tollers and the people like Jack are worth keeping alive, are worth recognizing, because they were good men, and they were very talented men. And in essence, they were very humble men,” he said, “and I think that’s great.”

Local connection

Former Marion resident Jonathan Swenson, who now lives in Minnesota, was at Payne’s house during The Gazette’s interview. He spent a week training with the actor and playwright, to step into the shoes of C.S. Lewis and Winston Churchill, another character Payne portrays. Swenson also plans to be in Cedar Rapids to watch “Lewis & Tolkien” at the Paramount.

The demand for the touring shows is high enough that several actors now go out on the road with the various plays under the Bird and Baby Theatrical Productions umbrella, the title of which reflects the nickname Lewis and Tolkien gave to The Eagle and Child pub.

“A Christmas with C.S. Lewis” has 14 engagements between Thanksgiving and the weekend before Christmas. “It stands to reason I can’t do them all,” Payne said. So he’s been working through the Lewis and Churchill scripts with Swenson, who became a familiar face on Eastern Iowa stages, through leading roles in “Annie” and “Fiddler on the Roof.”

“I’ve been very pleased,” Payne said of his eager pupil. “ … And he’s getting very close to sounding like an Englishman.”

Comments: (319) 368-8508; diana.nollen@thegazette.com