Theatre in Review: Saint Joan (Manhattan Theatre Club/Samuel J. Friedman Theatre)

	Adam Chanler-Berat, Condola Rashad. Photo: Joan Marcus

Saint Joan can't catch a break. Last season, she was made the heroine of a risibly bad musical, Joan of Arc: Into the Fire. This season, we get the calamitous Manhattan Theatre Club revival of Saint Joan. At this rate, somebody is going to revive Goodtime Charley, the flop musical in which Ann Reinking's Joan played second fiddle to Joel Grey's song-and-dance Dauphin.

But I digress; MTC's production is a handful all by itself. George Bernard Shaw's play is a very tricky proposition: The title character is offstage during some of the play's most central scenes. Her amazing military victories are reported rather than shown. Shaw switches tone with nearly every scene, skipping from high comedy to fantasy to barn-burning melodrama. And, title character or not, Joan never excites the playwright's interest in her spirituality, her leadership ability, or what must have been a highly singular personality. To Shaw, these are givens, allowing him to make the larger argument that Joan's battle for France is the first gust of the winds of change that would, in the next century, reshape Europe from a loose collection of tiny kingdoms and duchies into a stately array of nations, defined by abstract ideas of Frenchness, Englishness, or what have you. At the same time, Joan's reliance on her own, deeply personal faith -- she alone, she insists, can interpret the meaning of her heavenly voices -- is an avatar of the rise of Protestantism, which will loosen the Catholic Church's grip on the temporal world.

To a greater extent than one might imagine, it falls on the actress playing Joan to fill out her character with a distinctive profile. As is made clear in Holly Hill's fascinating book, Playing Joan, which features interviews with nearly every living English-speaking actress of note who played the role up to 1993, there are many roads to success -- and just as many paths to failure. We seem to get Joan once every generation. Maryann Plunkett, who tackled the role in 1993, realized her as a woman of luminous spirituality and an iron will. Lynn Redgrave, who did it in 1977, is said to have succeeded best in Joan's penultimate scene, in which, dragged in front of a clerical court, she renounces her visions out of fear of dying, then furiously recants. Diana Sands, who took it on at Lincoln Center in 1968, was noted for giving the character a hard, peasant practicality that made her a rebel to contend with. (I missed the well-received Bedlam production of a few seasons back.)

At Manhattan Theatre Club, Condola Rashad brings to the role, well, not much of anything. Plainly put, the actress -- who has often been effective in contemporary dramas -- is in over her head. Based on her lackluster characterization and uninflected delivery, she apparently lacks the necessary classical training, especially the vocal work needed to frame and effectively deliver Shaw's sometimes witty, sometimes oratorical dialogue. Worse, there is nothing the least bit driven about Rashad's Joan: The character must burn with some kind of inner fire -- whether for the love of God or the thrill of war -- if the play is to make any sense; instead, Rashad's Joan is remarkably tranquil, her attention drifting off when she isn't speaking. It's not just that one can't believe her as the commander of an army; she'd be hard-pressed to plan a cocktail party.

Rashad's inability to make anything of Shaw's words is the most glaring problem, but she isn't alone in it. Daniel Sullivan's sluggish, aimless production is marked by several disappointing performances, most notably the Dauphin of Adam Chanler-Berat. The character, a sullen boy-king cursed with a kind of twentieth-century mentality -- he has no use for saints, military triumphs, or the pomp and ceremony that come with his job -- is usually a reliable laugh-getter. At the Friedman, the scenes with Joan and the Dauphin are painfully limp. Sullivan's handling of the first two or three scenes is so low-energy that the prospect of a very long evening stretches before one.

Things improve from time to time, when an actor with a solid technique takes the stage. I'm thinking of Jack Davenport, whose Earl of Warwick sets in motion the machinery to destroy Joan, all the while cheerfully acknowledging that it's nothing personal; Patrick Page, speaking in magnificently low, controlled tones as the Inquisitor who determines to save Joan's soul, even if it kills her; and Robert Stanton as an English clergyman of narrow views who experiences a startling change of heart when he sees Joan at the stake. Solid performances are also delivered by Daniel Sunjata as Joan's comrade-in-arms and Walter Bobbie as the bishop who conspires in accusing Joan of heresy while maintaining that his motives are strictly pastoral. (When Davenport, Bobbie, and Stanton take part in a discussion of Joan and her dangerous ideas, the play briefly starts to come to life.) Overall, however, the lack of directorial vision is sorely felt as the production lurches from scene to scene.

Sullivan has also allowed for some distinctly odd design choices, beginning with Scott Pask's set, which consists of several rows of hanging gold tubes, giving the impression that the play is unfolding in a pipe organ; it's a vast, hulking piece of architecture that further overwhelms the cast. The addition of Christopher Ash's video imagery -- reminiscent of bubbles or stars -- doesn't help; one point, the whole thing looks rather like those 1950s Christmas ornaments filled with bubbling water. It can't have been an easy task for lighting designer Justin Townsend, but he acquits himself well. The costume designer, Jane Greenwood, is known for her historical research, so I don't doubt that the costumes are correctly in period, but the actors look lost in the yards and yards of fabric that make up each outfit. Obadiah Eaves' sound design capably delivers the expected effects, including church bells, men in battle, and crackling flames.

Joan's big scene, in which she bows to the Church's demands, recants, and tears up her confession, finally manages to work up some drama, and, at the performance I attended, Rashad duly got some applause for telling off the assembled males. It was a sort of #MeToo moment and it suggested that the premise for this production was to catch the wave of women currently speaking truth to power. This is part of Joan's mystique, for certain, but it is only the thin top layer of a much more complex story, the elements of which include the mystery of her faith, her astonishing acumen in battle, and the provocation she posed to the worlds of church and secular politics. Not many playwrights take on saints -- you don't see anyone racing to write about Teresa of Ávila or Catherine of Siena -- so is it too much to ask that the one who sparked the imagination of one of the last century's great playwrights be given the consideration she deserves? -- David Barbour