On Stage

...ON STAGE By Albert Bermel The Force of Joan When a play with an extraordinary role is performed, something strange happens that can only be guessed at from reading the script Shaw's Joan of Arc, for example, acquires a force of its own as Saint Joan proceeds And if the actress does not match the role's fervor the force frees itself from the actress' control, it begins to play hei, and the most she can do is to trail along behmd it, hoping to catch up from time to time This mdependent force comes into existence because the other characters attribute it to Joan It is an awe, a compound of the reverence, fear and loathing in which Joan is variously held One might even say that this awe becomes the heroine of the play, dymg when Joan dies, revivmg during the epilogue The production at the Vivian Beaumont demonstrates this pomt painfully Joan is never more present than when she is physically absent, then the force takes over completely Scene four, the only one m which she does not appear, is the strongest of the seven Warwick and Cauchon are engaged m a battle of wits that is also a duel of vested interests They perceive the force as a twofold threat to the Catholic Church, because Joan is a direct link between God and the people (a heretic a Protestant), and to the aristocracy, because she is a direct link between the people and the French king (a rebel, a nationalist) The scene created by these two middlemen, sometimes said to be a bloodless ration of Shaviana relieved by jingoistic inanities from Stogumber, is in truth the play's triumph and a vindication of Shaw's claim that "intellect is essentially a passion " So fiercely do William Hutt (Warwick) and Tony van Bridge (Cauchon) animate their beliefs and misgivings, all the tune engaging m no activity more strenuous than standing and sitting, respectively, that the nub of the production resides m the scene Director John Hirsch has wisely put the intermission right after it, it could not have been topped Shaw uses that scene for yet another dramatic purpose As a rationalist he might be expected to discount Joan's miracles—hearing "her" saints' voices, picking out the Dauphm m a room full of strangers, causing the wind over the Loire to change direction, and so on What he actually does is to accept the supernatural doings mto his story and then suggest they hardly matter beside the force that is Joan, the greatest miracle of all Peasants may gawk when Beaudncourt's hens start to lay eggs again after Joan gets her way, but Warwick and Cauchon, the temporal and spiritual statesmen, know that the force they have to contend with makes such sorcery immaterial Shaw's saint is not a misty-eyed creature haloed with a penumbra of sunrise hghting She is a formidable personality Her blunt, personal pleas outargue the sophistry of church and state She can ask the play's critical question as an affirmation "What other judgment can I judge by but my own7" Of the half-dozen Joans I have seen, the only one who fitted herself to the character's force, who made scene four seem long because she was not in it, was Joan Plownght Diana Sands, the new tenant m the role, is a refined girl with plenty of vocal muscle She swings a pious gaze upward as though raising a fragile shaft of wood by one end Can this Joan be a virgin7 Yes A nun7 Maybe A peasant7 Doubtful A force that takes itself for granted as an instrument of salvation7 Out of the question Hirsch's treatment is marred by the pageantry of several scenes The ceremony too often dwarfs the characters, an effect Shaw took pains to avoid in his historical dramas He explained in the Preface that he abhorred pomp, circumstance and gorgeous stagmg (all those executions, funeral pyres regal defenestrations, and other Baroque hokum) The business of his play is to enact a scrabble for power among highly placed men The Maid, their superior in every respect but ruth-lessness, becomes their victim David Hays' set makes an imaginative leap away from Shaw's naturalistic stage directions, but it does not replace them coherently It has three mam elements—marbleized squares for a forestage, some sloping planks for an exit gangway, and a coppice of vertical golden and silver chimes at the rear for which I can offer no explanation Michael Annals has provided some unusually witty clothes He has Bluebeard the dandy in form-fitting gold armor The Dauphin starts out in gray mouse fur and clay-colored boots, after his coronation he wears a cross between a Tenniel King of Hearts outfit and a stained-glass window As a whole, though, the production does hole to lmmemonahze the force of Joan In two years or so I expect to remember only scene four, but that vividly The next entry at the Beaumont is Jean Grraudoux's Tiger at the Gates A distant echo of this prophetic work has been heard lately at the American Place, Ronald Rib-man's The Ceremony of Innocence Like Grraudoux's Hector, who strives to fend off the conflict with the Greeks Ribman's Ethelred the Unready is a pacifist surrounded by warmongers Since the chaotic structure of his Harry, Noon and Night and the tidier patterns of Journey of the Fifth Horse, Ribman has retreated into an old-fashioned formula The Ceremony of Innocence has every character's leading motive (rather than motives) tied mto the plotting There are scenes of pure tauntmg The villains are blackly uninteresting The suspense grows overwrought at the climax, and the genuinely rich writing occasionally dips into rko-archaic ("Had you not said ") Yet I had a better time watching this play than I usually have at the movies The theater being what it is, this tribute is a sincere one Much of the credit for the excitement generated during the evening goes to Arthur Seidelman, whose dnection holds the flashback material in place and prevents the dialogue from becoming staid His actors, from Donald Madden's Ethelred to Ernest Graves' Danish kmg, attack the speeches with a pantmg ardor Even the two dragons of the play, Ethelred's wife and son, give off more fire than smoke The most impressive moments occur during a fight on a bridge, played out in slow motion and under red lights Ethelred's son is attacked by four Danes whom he cuts down and beheads one at a time The remoteness achieved by the silence and near-placidity of the slaughter makes it all the more horrifying because more casual The play itself has positive qualities, other than its forceful language, that are liable to be overlooked Rib-man has created four ethically good people in Ceremony How many dramatists today can make good characters plausible...

...The last two I can think of were both in The Deputy He has also rung a change on the conventional wife and mother who entreat their man to stay away from the war, grasping his knees, beatmg at then: own eyebrows, and pulling out hair by the fistful Ethelred's queen and mother, although no Volumnias, are belligerent bitches If they are not much more than that, they are at least new playwntmg wrinkles Ribman has been accused of distorting history, of interpreting Ethelred's life not literally but liberally Since many historians bend known facts such as dates and chronology to fit preconceived theses, I don't see why the playwright should not have the same privilege Anyway, rehable data on the period happens to be scanty The sad results of hard literalism are all too evident in Peter Weiss' Song of the Lusitaman Bogey (St Marks Playhouse) Weiss generously gave American rights to the Negro Ensemble Company for its opening production, and the nec has repaid him handsomely with choral movement, chanting and song superbly orchestrated by Michael A Schultz The text itself is a statistical collage Two million of this, 300 of that, 854 of something else—the travelogue of information about Portuguese tyranny in Africa is so much more concerned with "conditions" and numbers than with people that it begins to seem as unreal as the news stones in Time magazine Weiss' one important concession to theatricality, the Bogey of the title, is a construction m the rough shape of a pterodactyl or a sphinx with a hanging jaw Through its iron teeth the actors, who alternately play the Portuguese rulers and the African oppressed, burp the official lme of jargon Some of this makes its ironic impact "A nation's civilization may be judged by the number of its serving personnel " Some is less effective "We have been defending the welfare of the world m Angola " Most of it is on a par with the gobbledygook put out by the State Department on the wake of every international crisis, that is, several tunes a week There is one personal episode in which a pregnant woman named Anna is kicked m the belly by policemen and cannot send anyone to her husband for help, Anna fives in a squalid, fly-infested shack, indistinguishable from thousands of others The conception of this sequence comes out of those 19th-century potboilers in which an innocent family is pushed out mto the snow by a vile landlord The women m the cast—four of them, all beautiful, all abundantly gifted—overshadow the five men, with the exception of Moses Gunn, who recites a hst of the big corporations that have holdmgs in Portuguese territory, intoning each name as if it were a death sentence allowing no appeal The best moment m the evening supervenes when the actors freeze their features into death's-head grins to accompany the hne, "They dwell content, their humility binds them to their owners " To some extent the play, translated by Lee Baxandall, does give the he to neocolonial apologists such as the late Clarence Randall But its content is undigested and it represents a lapse for Peter Weiss For the Negro Ensemble Company, it represents the promise of a powerful future...