Old Play in Manhattan

Saint Joan (by Bernard Shaw*) boasts a title role that is one of the great acting challenges of the modern theater. None of the actresses who have played Shaw's Joan on Broadway--Winifred Lenihan, Katharine Cornell, Uta Hagen--has left a lasting stamp upon the role. At the off-Broadway Phoenix Theater last week, Irish Actress Siobhan (pronounced Shiv-awn) McKenna brought something a good deal more memorable to it. Her thick-brogued, almost blatantly peasantlike Joan was all drive and no dreaminess. She had an unshakable faith in her voices and her mission because it could never occur to her to doubt them; hers was a kind of fanatic's certitude, not a heretic's defiance, less a refusal to "reason" or listen or obey than the sheerest incapacity.

Such undeflectable purpose, such one-track-mindlessness can have its acting limitations; and Actress McKenna plays with no great range and with a kind of fierce monotony. But by subordinating effect to essence, what Joan does to what Joan is, she makes an audience feel itself in close contact with someone, however rare, who is in close communication with something, however intangible.

This is a real achievement, because--though to say so may be a worse heresy than anything Joan was tried for--as a dramatic creation, Shaw's character in large measure fails. As a dialectical creation, his Joan is superb, just as the massively symbolic, impartially delineated conflict between Joan and the church, the sovereign self and the sovereign institution, inner light and outer law. is magnificently projected. But Shaw did not solve his problem of making Joan personally real by making her slangily realistic and outwardly much like other people. Her reality lay in how she differed from them; and Actress McKenna, by eschewing something three-dimensional yet vaguely radiant for something one-dimensional but truly intense, comes much closer to revealing it.

Very possibly Shaw's finest play, Saint Joan is yet one of his most uneven. The first third is little more than competent chronicle play; it is not till the second third that it becomes vibrantly Shavian; and not till the final third that it grows demonstrably great. At the Phoenix a generally torpid production stressed the play's long, slow climb before achieving--in the Trial Scene and the Epilogue--one of the great peaks of 20th century stage writing.

* For other news of Shaw, see BOOKS.

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