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Gonzaga University’s Magnuson Theatre will launch its 2016 season with “Freud’s Last Session” as part of a touring production from Wayland Baptist University. The play, by award-winning contemporary American playwright Mark St. Germain, will run at 7:30 p.m. Sept. 9-10.
Directed by Charles Pepiton, Gonzaga assistant professor of theatre, the play centers on an imaginary conversation between famed psychoanalyst Dr. Sigmund Freud who invites the young Oxford professor C.S. Lewis to his home in London, according to a press release. On the day England enters World War II, Freud and Lewis clash about love, sex, the existence of God and the meaning of life just weeks before Freud took his own life.
A recent critical reviewer, Peter Rollins, noted, “The play itself was beautifully directed by Charles Pepiton and powerfully performed by Marti Runnels (Freud) and Cory Norman (Lewis). The play is constructed as a type of living embodiment of conscious/unconscious interactions. …I was confronted, not with a crude pseudo-philosophical diatribe about God, but with a subtle and moving existential play about life and the limitations of philosophy when confronted with the shadows of our personal and political reality.”
Faculty from GU’s philosophy department will participate in a panel discussion immediately following the Sept. 9 performance.
Admission for “Freud’s Last Session” is $15 for the public and $10 for Gonzaga students, faculty and staff. Tickets are now available online.
Tracy Simmons is an award-winning journalist specializing in religion reporting and digital entrepreneurship. In her approximate 20 years on the religion beat, Simmons has tucked a notepad in her pocket and found some of her favorite stories aboard cargo ships in New Jersey, on a police chase in Albuquerque, in dusty Texas church bell towers, on the streets of New York and in tent cities in Haiti. Simmons has worked as a multimedia journalist for newspapers across New Mexico, Texas, Connecticut and Washington. She is the executive director of SpokaneFāVS.com, a digital journalism start-up covering religion news and commentary in Spokane, Washington. She also writes for The Spokesman-Review and national publications. She is a Scholarly Assistant Professor of Journalism at Washington State University.
