St. Joan

G. B. Shaw's plays have taken his death badly. The scenes creak at the joints. The wit sputters more often than it fizzes. The characters seem alive from the neck up only. St. Joan has not been spared. In a conscientious but lethargic revival at Manhattan's Lincoln Center Repertory Theater, the play drones on like a college seminar labeled "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Nationalism, 1412-1431." In the title role, Diana Sands is earth-bound but never God-intoxicated, more of a common scold than an uncommon saint.

The theatrical problem of St. Joan is an immense credibility gap. At the heart of the play is a simple country maid who hears what she believes to be divine voices. Are they heavenly or hallucinatory? She secures access to France's Dauphin (Edward Zang) and convinces him of her inspired mission to raise his nation from the mire of defeat and British occupation. She dons a soldier's garb, leads the army to lift the siege at Orleans, and then crowns the Dauphin King in Rheims Cathedral.

The Maid clearly has charisma, but how does Shaw indicate it? He has the other characters say several times: "There's something about the girl." All the rest is left to the actress who plays Joan. She must make the audience believe in the other characters' phenomenal belief in her. This, Diana Sands fails to do. She stresses Joan the outward realist and scants Joan the inner mystic. Her voice can be heard, and a trifle too stridently, but her "voices" are mute.

Last year Diana Sands played the protagonist in Robert Lowell's Phaedra with Philadelphia's Theater of the Living Arts and failed to be consumed by passion, as in Joan she fails to be consumed by faith. Like the founders of the Negro Ensemble, she has publicly deplored "the wall" most Negro performers face. With indubitable talent and spunk, she has proved that the wall can be scaled. Yet she is encouraging herself, or being encouraged, as a Negro, to attempt parts for which she currently lacks the size, range and maturity as an actress.

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