Pure pyre

Trinity's Saint Joan is smoking

by Carolyn Clay

SAINT JOAN. By George Bernard Shaw. Directed by Amanda Dehnert. Set design by David Jenkins. Costumes by Ron Cesario. Lighting by Amy Appleyard. With Jennifer Mudge Tucker, William Damkoehler, Eric Tucker, Ed Shea, Brian McEleney, and Algernon D'Ammassa. At Trinity Repertory Company through January 17.

Trinity Repertory Company lights a fire under Shaw's Saint Joan, with a stripped-down, streamlined production bursting with the vigor of the youthful team that sparked it. There are times when you want at least to threaten its stridently saucy Joan with a lighted match or cut the current to the boxing-ring clanger that replaces the sound of Joan's "blessed blessed church bells that send my angel-voices floating to me on the wind." But at its less aggressively souped-up best, the staging crackles with energy and burns with the intelligence of Shaw's ideas -- which he sets forth not just in his lengthy 1923 play but in a sizable preface that describes Joan of Arc as "the most notable Warrior Saint in the Christian calendar, and the queerest fish among the eccentric worthies of the Middle Ages."

George Bernard Shaw, who was born in 1856 and lived to the age of 94, was a relative spring chicken when he penned St. Joan, which some consider his masterpiece. But 1996 Trinity Rep Conservatory graduate (and chip-off-the-old-Adrian-Hall) Amanda Dehnert, who helms this audacious staging, is 25 years old -- as is Jennifer Mudge Tucker, the talented TRC grad who plays the Maid. The two first collaborated on Saint Joan in a 1997 Conservatory workshop that so impressed the higher-ups, a plan was hatched to hone the production for the professional company. Now Brian McEleney, co-director of the conservatory, is part of the six-member cast that populates this Joan, which is as rough and passionate, if sometimes as annoying, as the Maid herself.

Shaw's thesis is that Joan was burned for her sheer upstart presumption. She threatened the Church Militant by cutting it out of her fervent relationship with God (she took her marching orders from St. Margaret and St. Catherine) and irked the feudal aristocracy by advocating that rulers of nations were beholden not to their lords but to hers. The Church is primarily represented in the play by the Archbishop of Rheims, where Joan, on a military roll, had her precious Dauphin crowned Charles VII in 1429; and by Peter Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, who presided over the 1431 Inquisition at Rouen, where she was declared a heretic and turned over to the "secular arm" that happily pushed her to the fire. That would be, in Shaw's rendering, the English Earl of Warwick, who deems Joan's death "a political necessity which I regret but cannot help."

Into six scenes and a fanciful epilogue, Shaw fits Joan's rise from insolent farmer's daughter demanding a horse and armor from her local squire to rallying inspiration and drum major of the French army to all around big head, political prisoner, tragic martyr, and fried saint marveling at her own beatification. Along the way, he puts his Shavian spin on several centuries of human history and roasts reactionary ideas like so many marshmallows. But though clearly enamored of his Joan, the playwright railroads no one (except, perhaps, the blockheaded English Chaplain de Stogumber, a combination 15th-century jingoist and Jerry Falwell). For the most part, Joan's reluctant friends and persecutors do their compassionate if sometimes begrudging best by her. Both innocent and fanatic, however, the Maid will not be counseled. Observes the Inquisitor: "Unless you put a gag in her mouth you cannot prevent her from convicting herself ten times over every time she opens it."

It's hard to say what Shaw would think of Trinity's full-frontal assault on his masterpiece. The audience forms an arc around an elevated flagstone runway flanked by a couple of scaffolds. A garage door in the rear stage wall is noisily raised and the cast rush in like a SWAT team. The order of scenes is barked out Brechtian-style ("Joan versus the Dauphin," "Joan versus the Church versus the State"), the proceedings janglingly punctuated by a boxing-ring buzzer. Most of the action takes place, in a bright bath of overhead light, on the runway, its chief furnishings a heavy table and an old-easy-chair throne that frequently winds up, like bouncy Joan, atop the table.

Particularly in the opening scene, the in-your-face comic approach can be grating. Mudge Tucker's pigtailed, bubblegum-popping Joan, dressed as an English schoolgirl in knee socks and plaid pleated skirt, is too show-offish, too consciously one-upping Eric Tucker's Robert de Baudricourt. Similarly, in the second scene, there is more Three Stooges roughhousing than is necessary among the inner circle bullying the Dauphin.

When the play hits its intellectual stride, though, the affectation largely melts away. In the bristling scene-four negotiation among Warwick (Ed Shea), Cauchon (McEleney), and de Stogumber (William Damkoehler), we are watching three Trinity pros at the top of their game, eloquently personalizing the Shavian argument as they use it to muscle one another. And in the trial scene, which Dehnert has simply and strikingly staged, the younger half of the cast -- Mudge Tucker's now ghostly Joan, Eric Tucker's insidiously mild Inquisitor (he's also a tough/tender Dunois), and Algernon D'Ammassa's soulful amalgam of Shaw's Canon D'Estivet and Brother Martin Ladvenu -- rises to the level of the seasoned trio.

Mudge Tucker's Joan, her blond hair lank, her figure small in soiled white undershirt and pantaloons, is carried in like a sack of flour and seated alone toward the middle of the runway. Her judges are at our level, though Cauchon and the Inquisitor come at her from all directions, trying with all their concentrated might to get her to recant. Except for the fragile white spot that is Joan, the theater is dim. The interchange is riveting, and when the seemingly beaten Joan rises to recant her recantation, Mudge Tucker's choked-yet-soaring rendering of what must be one of the most famous speeches in modern drama is glorious. I've heard it a hundred times, and it moved me to tears.

Yes, there are things I would change about this production; it's tricky to balance slapstick with seriousness, and an actress playing Joan walks a tough road from dauntless caricature to touching truth. But by the end, I was sufficiently won over by Dehnert and company that I didn't mind their bringing a pizza into the epilogue. This scene's a little dotty anyway: a 1456 reunion of the principal characters, some alive, some dead, in a dream of Joan's one-time Dauphin, now Charles the Victorious. Reacting with a mix of incredulity, cackle, and spark to news of her beatification, Joan inquires, "O God that madest this beautiful earth, when will it be ready to receive Thy saints?" I don't know about this beautiful earth, but Trinity audiences should count themselves lucky to receive this unbeautiful Saint Joan.