Unemployed Saint

By Robert T. Jones

JOAN

Music and Book by AL CARMINES

Joan of Arc has been many people to many writers. To Al Carmines, the off-Broadway clergyman-showman (TIME, May 22), she is an idealist with a square build, a butch haircut, a belting voice, and a yen for planting bombs in public toilets for the sake of the revolution.

Carmines' contemporary maid of Manhattan needs no Dauphin to betray her; church, state and even some of her friends vie for that role. She lives in the East Village with Ira the Junkie (Ira Siff) and Tracy (Tracy Moore), a slogan-shouting nobody. The three hail the blessings of unlicensed polyandry by singing "Now we understand the Trinity . . ." Lumbering home one night, Joan (Lee Guilliatt) meets a miniskirted doll (Essie Borden) who is--what else? --the Virgin Mary enjoying a one-day pass from Camp Paradise. The encounter makes a revolutionary of Joan, who goes to her preordained end while a cellmate giggles vacantly and the chorus sings a gospel hymn.

Who was she? No one but a girl out of work, Carmines seems to say. She led no armies, won no victories (not even philosophical ones), and her death succeeds only in radicalizing her mother. Can Carmines make much of an evening of such material? He can and does. He puts together gospel music, ballads and burlesque, juxtaposing idiocy and idealism. He gets good acting and excellent singing from his cast, but Carmines himself is the best show. He sings, acts the Greenwich Village minister and, scrunched over a grand piano in the dark of the Circle in the Square the ater, plays the music for the whole performance without even a drum for company. Neither he nor Joan needs any thing else.

Robert T. Jones

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