THEATER REVIEW : Clean, Simple Approach Adds Sparkle to Players’ ‘Saint Joan’

The world is hard on its saints, canonized or not. Witness the untimely ends of Thomas Beckett, Thomas More and Mahatma Gandhi. Somehow people like these never seem to be around after 25 years’ service to collect their pensions and solid gold watches.

In “Saint Joan,” now playing at the Lamb’s Players Theatre through May 29, George Bernard Shaw suggests that the world will continue to kill its emissaries of light because they threaten society by reminding people of standards that they have neither the courage nor selflessness to follow.

It’s just the kind of morality play that Lamb’s Players, a self-professed Christian theater troupe, does best. It’s no accident that one of their best shows from last year was “A Man for All Seasons,” a show about More that similarly mixes conviction with humor and heart.

Their “Saint Joan” does not disappoint. Cleanly directed by Robert Smyth, the production maintains a simplicity of design that sets off the ensemble work like jewels in a crown. At the center of it all shines Lamb’s veteran Deborah Gilmour Smyth as Joan, the 17-year-old French farm girl who followed the voices of her God to lead the French to victory against the English.

The part requires a radiant charisma which Smyth projects, much like a white light that spills prismatically into the limited, partisan understandings of the other characters.

All the actors, except Joan, do double duty in multiple parts and they do it well. Tom Stephenson makes an especially witty and worthy foil as the weak-willed Dauphin whom Joan has to make a man of and later as the grim, controlling Inquisitor who ultimately destroys her.

David Cochran Heath moves smoothly from the humor of the reluctant captain bamboozled into giving Joan her first chance to fight the bishop who, out of religious belief, becomes the Judas who sells her to the English.

Duane Danials uses his operatically trained voice to portray two sides of the political coin that purchased Joan’s death: first as the archbishop put off by the way Joan usurped his power over the king, then as the Earl of Warwick, fearful that Joan’s victories would threaten the English peerage.

The thoroughly modern costumes by Veronica Murphy Smith include combat fatigues and black boots for Joan. Smith hereby plays up the timeliness of the story, even as Mike Buckley’s versatile wooden boxes play up the timelessness of it--representing in one scene a bed, in another a trench and in another a court of judgment.

The lighting, also by Buckley, deftly plays on shadows and light, while boldly plunging into symbolic splashes of color, including one bright red light that suggests the off-stage glare of Joan’s pyre. The music, an eclectic melange arranged by Robert Smyth, similarly accentuates the mood, moving from Benjamin Britten to Leonard Bernstein to a flute segment from Aaron Copland that breaks like the sun through the clouds.

Shaw’s philosophical ideas, while brilliantly expressed in this three-hour play, were not new when he presented them in 1923. Dostoyevsky covered similar ground in the Grand Inquisitor chapter of “The Brothers Karamazov” when he theorized that if Christ himself returned, he would be crucified again.

But it was timely when Shaw wrote it. After having been burned as a witch in 1413, Joan was declared a saint in 1920.

As Shaw has Joan point out in the play, that doesn’t mean that anyone was able or even willing to “unburn” her if they could. She was safer dead as far as the institutions of both church and state were concerned. But if it is true, as T.S. Eliot wrote, that “saint and martyr rule from the tomb,” then Joan is one of those rulers. This moving and provoking play remains a fitting throne.

“SAINT JOAN”

By George Bernard Shaw. Director is Robert Smyth. Costumes by Veronica Murphy Smith. Set and lighting by Mike Buckley. Stage manager is Michael Gier. With David Cochran Heath, Ken Wagner, Deborah Gilmour Smyth, Rick Meads, James Pascarella, Duane Danials, Mark Robertson and Tom Stephenson. At 8 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays with Saturday-Sunday matinees at 2. Closes May 29. At the Lamb’s Players Theatre, 500 Plaza Blvd, National City.