Joan's arc

Tucker and Dehnert get into character

by Bill Rodriguez

Jennifer Mudge Tucker

Saint Joan is widely regarded as George Bernard Shaw's best play, and with good reason. It has few of the windy ruminations that make stretches of Man and Superman sound like orations at a lectern, and what monologues there are grow out of the action as spontaneously as shouts.

Perhaps what is most remarkable about Shaw's accomplishment is that he invented convincing conversations from an episode that is as outlandish as it is historically accurate. (If the Bill and Monica saga were fiction, wouldn't it be hooted off the bookshelves as lurid and implausibly motivated?)

The illiterate daughter of a prosperous farm family, Joan of Arc was all of 16 when she came to the French court to convince the king-to-be, Charles VII, that she could save France. And he believed her. He gave her command of his troops, and with the help of the voices of her favorite saints she raised the siege of Orleans and soon won a major battle.

Recent Trinity Conservatory graduate Jennifer Mudge Tucker has had several prominent roles in recent seasons at Trinity Repertory Company, from Polly Peacham in Threepenny Opera to Marion the librarian in The Music Man. She also played the title role in Saint Joan in a Conservatory staging a year and a half ago. Directing her then and again in the current main stage production is Trinity artistic associate Amanda Dehnert, another up-and-comer at Trinity. She has been music director for several shows and has directed A Midsummer Night's Dream and A Christmas Carol at Trinity. They are both 25, first met at the conservatory, and in a recent interview each separately described the other as her best friend. Speaking in the theater's archives room during a rehearsal break, they sometimes finished each other's sentences.

Q: It's unusual that you previously worked on the play together in a workshop production. What did you discover that surprised you on this try, when you had more time?

Amanda: It's been so much like re-discovering it, much more than re-mounting it.

Jennifer: Because it was so long ago, and we were so different and we've done so much together since then.

Amanda: I've been discovering the difference in Jennifer's performance. It's very subtle. I can tell that you're two years older than you were then. And I can find it in my directing, too. In the first production we got away with a lot of raw energy. All I did, I spent a lot of time just sort of yelling for people to care more. That was the entire extent of my direction for the first production: care!

Q: Have you come to any fundamental understandings in this take on Saint Joan that you hadn't earlier?

Amanda: We'd been working on the inquisition scene, and I'm embarrassed to admit that I never grasped until two days ago that it's not to determine whether or not she's a heretic, it's to get her to recant her heresy. I know that sounds sort of silly and obvious, but I had never understood it before, I had never wrapped my mind around that.

Q: So in their own perverted way, they were on her side.

Jennifer: Oh, they believed they were. Shaw says in his preface that there are no villains in this piece. Everyone's doing the best they can.

Amanda: I remember a problem with the inquisition before was that I always felt you were really just fighting with them. Because all they were really doing was fighting with you. What we were missing entirely was that they were trying to save you --

Jennifer: The miscommunication.

Amanda: The miscommunication. And you have no idea what they're trying to save you from.

Jennifer: Right, right, right.

Q: Was the characterization clear to you from the text?

Jennifer: It's interesting to me that he called it Saint Joan, because he didn't write a saint. That's one of the good things about having played it before. I spent the first two weeks going around saying, I don't know how to play a saint. How do you play a saint? I don't know how to be saintly. Like, you can't play a saint. But she's not a saint. She died and then they made her a saint. (Laughs)

Amanda: Which is why he wrote an epilogue. He felt it necessary to show the canonized Joan as well. By saying that, he implies that Joan in scenes one through six --

Jennifer: -- is this person. A very inspired genius of a person. But she was very tactical to get her way, which she believed was God's way, so it wasn't selfish or mean-spirited . . . I don't think my Joan is 100-percent likable in every scene at all. He didn't write her that way. She can be loud-mouthed and obnoxious, stubborn. They are all qualities I can identify with. (Laughs) We would be bored if for three hours we saw somebody who was very, very nice.

Q: So you try to put a bit of a teenager in some of her lines, to remind us that she's still a kid?

Jennifer: He's done so much of it, I don't know if I can take credit for anything that's really great.

Q: You guys are best buddies, which must be mostly an advantage. But was it also a disadvantage in a professional relationship?

Jennifer: When we're at rehearsal, she'll come up to us and punch us or put her arm around us or say, "Don't do that thing." And it's good, because it's really about the work and about the play. We know when the other one is being stupid or thinking about something that doesn't matter. And then we'll say it: "It's not about that, it's about the play." We agreed that this play is great, that Joan of Arc is really cool, that we want to do a great production. And we are lucky to have jobs where we get paid to work together, because we respect each other and love each other.