Review: In Shaw’s ‘Saint Joan,’ a Sane and Sensible Martyr

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Who is Joan?

It’s harder to answer that question than to itemize who she isn’t.

According to George Bernard Shaw, whose 1923 play “Saint Joan” opened on Wednesday in a Manhattan Theater Club revival, the first thing she isn’t is mad. The saintly voices and visions that instruct her, a medieval farm girl, to don armor and drive the English from France are merely the “dramatization by Joan’s imagination” of the “evolutionary appetite.”

Nor is she the sorceress and strumpet Shakespeare depicts in “Henry VI, Part 1” or the romantic lass in petticoats Mark Twain imagines in his final novel, “Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc.”

Even the Roman Catholic Church, which convicted her as a heretic in 1431 — a finding that led secular authorities to burn her at the stake — later vacated its opinion. She was exonerated in 1456 and canonized in 1920.

Any production of the play thus hangs on how the director and star decide to deal with the negatively defined presence at its center. In Daniel Sullivan’s thoughtful if mostly becalmed staging at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater on Broadway, he and Condola Rashad, his chipper Joan, stick close to the author’s brief. Their Maid of Orleans is, as Shaw writes in the play’s preface, “a born boss.”

Ms. Rashad, a three-time Tony nominee for her performances in “Stick Fly,” “The Trip to Bountiful” and “A Doll’s House, Part 2,” brings her usual intelligence and unfussy theatricality to that interpretation. Her Joan is not the shouty, oracular, crazy-eyed Amazon she’s often played as, but a sensible and enthusiastic manager you could imagine setting a rowdy high school to rights.

France in 1429 is something of a rowdy high school, at that. When we meet the teenage Joan as she begins her crusade to rout the English, her country is a collection of squabbling dukedoms, with the runty Dauphin, the late king’s despised and uncrowned son, holed up in Touraine. (In Jane Greenwood’s witty costumes, Adam Chanler-Berat looks like Little Lord Fauntleroy after a mugging.) To fulfill her vision of unification, Joan must first work her way into his court, then around his reluctance to take action.

Shaw structures “Saint Joan” as a picaresque chronicle: six scenes and an epilogue that mark turning points in Joan’s life and reputation. The play is also picaresque as to genre, sampling theatrical styles along the way. It begins with light comedy, as Joan outwits or browbeats squires, soldiers, courtiers and even an archbishop into letting her have her way.

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In these arguments — the whole play is argument — Ms. Rashad’s Joan is always relaxed, never riled or cowed. She stares straight into the faces of her superiors, even the military captain (Patrick Page) who stands bare-chested in front of her, trying to intimidate her with machismo. He fails miserably as Joan twists his words to prove her points, all the while gesturing with just one hand as if using both would be wasteful.

But as is often the case with Shaw, fidelity to his intentions is not unequivocally good for productions of his plays. So although it’s a relief to experience a phlegmatic instead of a violent Joan, it’s also a perplexity because the choice robs her of psychology. A hero and genius she may be, but somehow also inert: not much different from a statue if it were blessed with leadership abilities.

That blank quality in Ms. Rashad’s Joan leaches the play of drama as the scenes darken from comedy to adventure (she helps raise the successful Siege of Orléans) to pageant (the crowning of the Dauphin) to legal procedural. And if her calm perseverance suggests well enough how she manages to convince the king and the generals, it provides little evidence of how she could inspire the troops and, beyond them, the populace.

Still, when the play reaches its tragic sixth scene — Joan’s trial and burning — all that withholding pays off.

By now we know that this Joan is sound, faithful and temperate. This makes the trial more dangerous, not less, because the ridiculous charges against her are so easily dismissed. We can take it as mere comic relief when the spectacularly dimwit assessors played by Robert Stanton and Maurice Jones keep saying that she is a witch, that she stole the Bishop’s horse and, worst, that her voices speak in French instead of English.

As a result, her complete vulnerability to the graver charges of sedition, idolatry, disobedience, heresy and pride is more harshly revealed. She is fatally unprepared by her sincere innocence to understand the moral danger that the presiding Bishop (Walter Bobbie) and Inquisitor (Mr. Page, again) instruct her to acknowledge and that even her most sympathetic supporter, a liberal Dominican played powerfully by Max Gordon Moore, must beg her to resist.

That danger is, in essence, presumption: “What other judgment can I judge by but by my own?” Joan asks, casually assuming supremacy over churchmen and kings. From this idea comes not only the necessary sentence of a perfectly fair proceeding but also, in the fullness of time, Protestantism, nationalism, individualism and, as Shaw would have it, the Great War, which had recently concluded as he started writing the play.

The brilliant scene in which he winds all of these ideas into a noose can hardly fail if it is done properly, and here it is a marvelous highlight. Mr. Page, never better, makes of his rumbling basso something that is somehow both terrifying and loving; he uses every theatrical trick in his arsenal to convince Joan to spare herself by recanting. And Ms. Rashad, as if the weight of her fate were only now hitting her, along with the weight of the play itself, finally explodes in emotion. It’s devastating.

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I can’t tell whether the withhold-and-release effect is deliberate; not much else about the production suggests a focus on the big picture. Certainly not Scott Pask’s set, a phalanx of cheap-looking organ pipes that regroup to indicate different locales. Worse, they lead you to hope for thrilling toccatas and fugues when all you get from Bill Frisell’s music is misty watercolor pop.

Nor does much that’s thrilling emerge from most of the cast save Ms. Rashad and Mr. Page. Not that the characters aren’t neatly defined — notably John Glover as the tart archbishop, Daniel Sunjata as Joan’s comrade Dunois and Jack Davenport as the wheedling Earl of Warwick. But they all seem strangely conflict-averse as they promote or subvert the Maid among them. By the time you get to the surreal epilogue, it’s as if they were in a low-stakes sitcom called “Oh That Joan!”

Mr. Sullivan’s deference to Shaw’s anti-theatrical style is somewhat surprising from the director who gave us a blisteringly reframed (and successful) “Merchant of Venice” in 2010. But it does have the salutary feminist effect of highlighting competence instead of hysteria. If the production as a whole made up for the diminished dramatics with ample attention to its intellectual grandeur — as it does in the trial scene — it might even have seemed bracingly modern.

Instead it just seems modest: surely the last thing any one ever accused Shaw or “Saint Joan” of being.