(2 of 9)
Out in front, as the seconds ticked toward curtain time, the first-night audience fell into a tense and unaccustomed hush. They liked Julie's nerve, but they feared her fate. They remembered, too, the Joans of Katharine Cornell (1936), of Ingrid Bergman (1946) and of Uta Hagen (1951). Could Julie top them? The auguries had been uncertain. "Joan of Arc was put into history," one critic had said grandly, "so that Julie Harris could play the part." However, the play had proved a flop in London with another Joan, and the table talk at Sardi's had it that Julie "hasn't got the diaphragm for these big things, you know."
Eternity & Everywhere. The curtain rises to a rising ah of delight that passes into a volley of applause. The setting by Jo Mielziner is a striking thing. Instead of painted scenery, he has used a simple cotton scrim that sets the time at eternity, the place at everywhere. The forestage is filled with what looks like a mighty cubistic boulder on which Joan sits pale and still, like a piteous Prometheus in the midst of her tormentors. The tableau breaks, and the trial, which is the metaphor the action moves in, takes its course. In a matter of moments it is clear that the London fiasco is not to be repeated by Producer Kermit Bloomgarden. For that production Christopher Fry had done a literal translation from the French. For this one Lillian Hellman has cut 43 pages of Anouilh -and ennui. What is left, while faithful to the original in scenic form, has been trenchantly rewritten by one of the ablest theater minds in the U.S., and the result is intellectual theater at close to its best. The ideas that the drama deals in are among the grandest in the human range, and as they marshal and maneuver on the stage, the audience feels caught and carried in the icy passion of a superhuman chess game in which the stakes are life or death for more than Joan. Compared of course to the virile mace-work of George Bernard Shaw in his Saint Joan, it is sometimes oversubtle rapier play in the Gallic fashion that scores points but does not really make a wound. The actors, however, under brilliant coaching by Director Joseph Anthony, use their weapons with such skill and fury that the beholder can often mistake words for swords. In all, the play lacks the emotional substance of important drama, but it has the cerebral excitement and the visual flair of superior theater.
For her judges, Joan plays out the great scenes of her life: the coming of the voices, the assignations with angels and the beating she got when her father thought they were men, the political rehearsal with a rural winesack (Theodore Bikel), the advent at Chinon, the brotherhood in arms (Bruce Gordon) and the rich reek of fighting France -stale wine, hot harness -that kept her head clear through the glory and the banners and the blood. Scene follows scene without shift; past follows present follows past as sun follows shadow on a dappled day. As Joan strides through her story, the lights minister her mood and clothe her in whatever world she needs as vividly as any scenery could, while the responsive scrim behind her glitters with cathedral glass or glooms with dungeon night. The climax comes in her quenchless defiance of the inquisition: "What I am. I will not denounce. What I have done, I will not deny."