Saint Joan, which George Bernard Shaw wrote 400 years after Joan of Arc lived, opened Thursday night at the UNC School of the Arts.
Shaw's Joan is not a romanticized heroine so much as a woman who was gifted with vision and the kind of authentic rebellion that has marked geniuses throughout time, in art as well as life.
Director Gerald Freedman makes sure that his staging is timeless: Contemporary costuming, the music of John Coltrane, and sets splashed in abstract swaths of colors recalling Franz Kline let us know that Freedman, like Shaw, is interested in the person of Joan. What propelled her? Sustained her? Are the voices she hears madness or inspiration?
First staged in 1924 shortly after Joan was canonized, Shaw's Joan is about a woman who bucked the Catholic church and was burned at the stake as a heretic. She submits only to God, and may well have been one of the first who became known as a "Pro-test-ant." Joan does protest, and she won't alter what she believes to be true.
She also reflects any individual who goes her or his own way, then or now. Coltrane and Kline are apt choices to represent geniuses who burn with their passion. To reinforce the personal feeling of Shaw's portrait, Freedman sometimes places actors in the audience. Bishops, lawyers, politicians and prosecutors are not far away.
Joan, played by Molly Carden, is not so much an innocent or a saint as she is a woman who will take on the Catholic church, lawyers and politicians to stand by her assertion that she follows the voice of God and must save France as a soldier. She is the lone female among nearly 30 male characters. Particularly moving is her friend Dunois, or "Jack," as she calls him. Played by Andrew "Ace" Jernigan, Jack is tender and devoted. Among those who oppose her, the Earl of Warwick, played by Ryan Roets, is a cool, calculating politician who pursues power methodically. Alex Hoeffler as the Inquisitor is undaunted, and John Reese as Charles, the Dauphin, taps our sympathies without being hapless.
The play is a long but arresting vehicle that asks us to consider where we put our own allegiance and at what price.
The UNC School of the Arts presents Saint Joan at 8 p.m. today and Nov. 18-21, and at 2 p.m. Sunday and Nov. 21 in the Thrust Theatre of Performance Place on campus. Tickets are $12, $10 for seniors and students. Call 721-1945.
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