Thank Offering

In 1938 German-born Cinemactress Luise Rainer (The Good Earth, The Great Ziegfeld) became a U. S. citizen. When she returned from Europe recently, she realized how much her new citizenship meant to her, wanted to do something for her adopted country. What she could do best was act. Though she had never appeared on a U. S. stage, she had acted abroad under Max Reinhardt and others.

She had first achieved fame playing Shaw's Saint Joan in German at 17. The Civic Theatre of Washington, D. C. had a production of Saint Joan scheduled. She agreed to go there, donate her services for a week in a production whose proceeds would go to the Red Cross.

In Washington, Patriot Rainer quickly took charge. She brought her own director, German-born Erwin Piscator ("The Belasco of Berlin"), from Manhattan.

Then she threw the Civic Theatre's name off the billing. During rehearsals she got pretty upstage, held long confabs with Piscator in shrill-voiced German, while the cast stood around wondering whether it was stage business or themselves she was talking about. She was finally asked to speak English, complied.

This week, before an opening-night audience glittering with Cabinet members, Ambassadors, Senators, Washington Society folk, Actress Rainer made her U. S. stage debut. Her role was the fattest and most formidable, for a woman, in the modern repertory--one which had taxed Dame Sybil Thorndike, Winifred Lenihan, Katharine Cornell. It overtaxed Actress Rainer. Frail and flowerlike, her straight dark hair falling about her face, she was the most appealing of all Saint Joans, and the feeblest.

In the dreamy moments when the Maid listens to her Voices, in the pathetic moments when she becomes terrified of the stake, in the radiant moments when she returns from beyond the grave to find she has become a legend and a saint, Luise Rainer was all innocent girlhood. But she could not spring to life as the other Joan --the fierce and fiery spirit, the obdurate deliverer of her people. Her voice rose, her eyes flashed, her little fists clenched to no avail: the effect was stagy and elocutionary.

The rest of the cast, though not up to a Broadway level, was often as not up to Actress Rainer. But they could not do justice to Shaw's play, which, for all its cracks at the English and gleeful satire against the Church, is one of the most serious that Shaw ever wrote. It holds up well, though it will never put its best foot forward until producers are allowed to do to Shaw what they do to Shakespeare: cut him drastically.

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