Guthrie Theater

At the core of Shadowlands is a love story with undeniable staying power: the account of the unusual relationship between C.S. Lewis and his wife Joy Davidman Gresham, an American poet and self-described Jewish-Communist-Christian. Lewis was a distinguished literary scholar and one of the 20th century's foremost popular writers on Christian theology. When he was 9, his mother died of cancer. When he was 61, his wife Joy died of the same disease. Both were racked with pain; both endured the false hope of brief remission; both left behind baffled, brittle sons. Part of Lewis plainly believed these horrors somehow reflected an almighty benevolent hand. Another part of him, the play argues, never could. That led him, as a younger man, to escape into writing the literature for which he is most remembered: children's fables such as The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. He yearned, it is suggested, for a healing magic he could not find in the everyday world.