Theater Review: Bernard Shaw’s ‘Saint Joan,’ Presented by the Manhattan Theatre Club

Saint Joan, which closes on Broadway on Sunday, arrived when the nearly century-old tragicomedy by George Bernard Shaw could be seen in a new light. This has less to do with the production capably but not sensationally mounted by the Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC), and more with the gender warfare of the moment.

You want a leader constantly having to face down men who underestimate or even condescend to her? Well, here is one who truly, to borrow the favorite verb of Mitch McConnell, “persisted”—whether by leading an army to victory on the battlefield or by being burned at the stake.

Despite themselves, even battle-hardened, cynical French soldiers realize that there is, as a few put it in the first act, “something about her.”

In one of the six scenes of this nearly three-hour play, Shaw has two adversaries--a French Cardinal and an English earl with precious little interest in religion--move toward an unexpected alliance through their mutual interest in stopping an even more unlikely common enemy, a French teenage farm girl, Joan of Lorraine. The adolescent—better known to posterity as St. Joan of Arc—threatens them as the representative of two new forces in history, what the Anglo-Irish playwright, in a case of puckish anachronism, terms “nationalism” and “Protestantism.”

The Archbishop of Rheims observes, not without anxiety, that “there is a new spirit rising in man; we are at the dawning of a wider epoch.” Joan, as the unwitting emblem of that "new spirit," is a threat to the medieval power structure.

But, while Shaw’s initial listeners might have nodded in agreement at that scene, as well as Shaw's observations on the cluelessness of career male military leaders (who had, only a few years before, sent countless young men to their death in WWI) and on intolerance. 

But the prime movers at the MTC are far more interested in a different struggle taking place after intermission. This struggle involves Joan, a woman of strength and determination who had lifted the siege of Orleans, now finding her strategy of carrying the flight to the English questioned anew by the men who had scoffed at her initial plan to raise the siege of Orleans in the Hundred Years' War.

As Joan, Condola Rashad has the only major female role in Shaw’s play. (Mandi Masden, playing the Duchess de la Tremouille, is on and off quickly.) She must interact with 17 different male actors and, as Joan, contend with each of them. Her Tony Award nomination is well-deserved, as she conveys the simplicity and purity that are at once the source of her strength in leading men to victory and of her endangerment in an ecclesiastical court shadowed by power politics.

Though Tony voters have singled out Rashad, a couple of other cast members also deserved consideration: Jack Davenport, as the cynical power player Earl of Warwick, and Patrick Page, making the most of two roles: the strutting military peacock Capt. Robert de Baudricourt and The Inquisitor, an ecclesiastical judge as intent that Joan receive a fair trial as he is fanatical in insisting that the charges against her are in and of themselves worthy of invoking the death penalty. 

I had forgotten just how long this play can be, no doubt because the only prior version I saw—a 1967 Hallmark Hall of Fame special, with Geneviève Bujold in the title role—clocked in at a TV-friendly two hours. Brooking no criticism for straining playgoers’ and critics’ preferences for shorter fare than the 3 1/2 hours he projected, Shaw airily noted in his preface to the play that “'what matters is not the absolute length of time occupied by a play, but the speed with which that time passes.”

Director Daniel Sullivan has steered a middle course between the playwright’s demands and the audience’s desire for different play lengths, bringing in the production at two hours and 45 minutes. He’s also added touches that bolster his interpretation without being inimical to the playwright’s intention (e.g., Page as Baudricourt confronts Joan bare-chested in an empty attempt to overwhelm her with machismo).  

But Shaw does Sullivan no favors with his dialogue-heavy text. Walter Bobbie (who plays the Bishop of Beauvais, Cauchon) noted, in a thoughtful post-show “talk back,” that Shaw was a “narrative essayist” who planted surprising theatrical touches in what were essentially dramas of ideas.

But much of the early going—particularly the scenes between Cauchon and Warwick, and between Joan and the soldier Dunois—consisted of static standoffs. It was only in the second half of the play, when Joan realizes she won’t have the support of the men she championed and, after her capture, goes on trial for heresy, that the full dramatic potential of the play as mounted by the MTC is achieved.

Theater Review: ‘Enemy of the People,’ at the Manhattan Theatre Club

There are two really good reasons why fans of good theater should make their way to the Manhattan Theater Club (MTC) for its new adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 play, An Enemy of the People. The first is the opportunity to see a rarely performed play by this 19^th-century master of realistic drama in something akin to the spirit in which it was written. The second is the chance to see—for the umpteenth time on a New York stage—an actor whose underemployment on TV and film has made him the darling of Gotham theater aficionados: Boyd Gaines.

An Enemy of the People might be my favorite Ibsen play, but in three decades of theatergoing I had never seen it performed until the preview performance by the MTC a couple of weeks ago.  Directors have taken to other plays by the Scandinavian playwright, seeing in them feminist rallying cries (A Doll’s House), early warnings about religious extremism and untruths about sexually transmitted diseases (Ghosts), dissections of capitalism (John Gabriel Borkman), or even vehicles for exploring bipolar disorders (Hedda Gabbler).

You’d think that Ibsen’s dramedy about a doctor’s environmental crusade would be made to order for today’s theater world. But the content has erected powerful obstacles.

For those who want their protagonists one-dimensionally heroic, Lillian Hellman’s stage manifestos are more congenial than Ibsen’s complex work that satirizes its hero when it is not attacking the townspeople who make him an outcast. And Dr. Thomas Stockmann’s scathing criticism of “the damned, solid, liberal majority”—backed by the playwright’s problematic belief in a superior mind produced by a Darwinian survival of the fittest—might as well be Kryptonite for today's theater professionals.

When people have had the chance to watch the play over the years, there’s a good chance that it was Arthur Miller’s 1950 adaptation, not Ibsen’s version. No matter what the playwright’s significant strengths, a willingness to take a point of view seriously before knocking it down was not among them. His version of Enemy of the People is a prime case in point, written at the height of McCarthyism, with Thomas Stockmann analogous to blacklist victims of Miller’s time.

The creator of Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, and A View From the Bridge will likely continue to be performed till the end of the lifetime of children now growing up, but the adversaries of his heroes are one-dimensional. He simply could not conceive of the strident dissident that annoys the very people he wants to help. His is a theater of straw men, inspired less by the complexity and good humor of Ibsen and Shaw than giving rise to the self-righteous Aaron Sorkin of The West Wing. What Miller’s Enemy gains in ditching in ditching Ibsen’s diatribes against the leveling influence in democratic societies, he loses in presenting an entirely one-sided argument without psychological dimension.

And so, this production, based on a new adaptation by British playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz, was all the more necessary. Sure, there’s the occasional anachronism (“cash cow”). But with help from director Doug Hughes, we finally have an Enemy of the People close to what the playwright intended.

Consider a short but telling exchange. Dr. Stockmann’s hero-worshipping daughter Petra, marveling at her father’s energy, blurts out that he’s been “working like a maniac” lately. Stockmann’s wife quickly hushes her up. It’s a hint that the doctor’s prosperity as staff physician at the municipal baths has been hard-won not simply because of his diligence, but also because his last medical stint in a rural Norwegian village likely ended in his nervous collapse.

This production is exceptionally well served in its lead, Gaines, who invests Dr. Stockmann with the energy of a mad stalk. This actor, perhaps known to TV viewers as Valerie Bertinelli’s husband on One Day at a Time nearly three decades ago, has graced New York theaters since then with one outstanding performance after another, in the likes of Company, Contact, Pygmalion, and 12 Angry Men, winning four Tony Awards in the process.

The complexity of Dr. Stockmann’s position can be seen here in his relationship to his brother Peter, who, as mayor of the town, is also Thomas’ boss. Prior translations of Ibsen emphasized Peter’s pomposity as much as Thomas’ heedlessness. To be sure, as played here by Richard Thomas (The Waltons’ John-Boy Walton, well into middle age), he is caught up in the perks of his position. But he’s also seriously angered that the sibling he helped rescue from penury now stands opposed to what had promised to be the mayor’s greatest achievement: the baths (advocated originally by the doctor himself, then placed, unbeknownst to him, in a mill that pumps its wastes into the pipes) that once promised to boost their coastal town’s economy.

Where Thomas thinks little of expenditures by either himself or the town, Peter is fixated on keeping both in check; where Thomas is utterly impolitic, Peter is the consummate politico, watching his every word and move. They are on a collision course, ending in a climactic battle just before intermission that is acted by Gaines and Thomas in a manner that heightens the overtones of this Cain-and-Abel relationship.

Hughes stages the town meeting where the tensions between the brothers break out publicly in all its raucousness and irony (the only dissenter in the proceedings—all stacked against the doctor—is the town drunk). It’s an event that leaves Dr. Stockmann perilously alone, but for his family, at curtain time—an appropriate, if subdued, ending to a show that convincingly highlights the enduring predicament of a whistle-blower in a democracy whose majority can be all too easily manipulated by leading citizens into self-destructive choices.