Word: joans
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Saint Joan. A curiously conglomerate compound is this latest Shaw play which the Theatre Guild brought out last week in the most gorgeous of red, gray and gold bindings. Some of the chapters are conceived in all the author's shameless artfulness as a melodramatist. Some of them are born of Shaw's inevitable penchant for controversial conversation. Christianity is alternately belabored and immortalized. History is consistently in caricature. These moods and many more are bundled into three full hours of changing action. Viewed as a whole, the play tantalizes. It is a stimulant and a drug mixed...
Four acts and an epilogue, subdivided into seven scenes, are required for the author's development of Joan from country maid to Saint. At the outset she appears at Vaucouleurs, where with a few brief sentences she persuades the testy Robert de Baudricourt to grant her soldiers and a horse to carry her to the Dauphin closeted at Chinon. Her recognition of the latter in the crowded throne room, his conversion to her standard follow. Shaw then revels in an arrant trumpery when he changes before your eyes the course of a contrary wind?the Maid's "miracle" on joining...
...brief glimpse of the Ambulatory of Rheims Cathedral, immediately after the crowning of the Dauphin Charles VII of France, depicts the beginning of Joan's fall. In the following trial scene at Rouen, she is condemned by the church and burned at the stake (off stage) for a heretic...
Winifred Lenihan was selected by the Guild to play Joan, despite obvious physical demerits. She is small, not the least masculine. Yet, looking back, it is impossible to picture the play without her performance. It seemed spiritually inspired, valiantly sustained, utterly convincing. The remainder of the cast maintain the enviable standard of the Guild productions. The designing in settings and costumes by Raymond Sovey rank at the head of the season's stage investitures...
Winifred Lenihan, leading lady in Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan: "On the front page of its Sunday Theatre Section, the New York Tribune published a large caricature of me, ignorantly referred to me as Florence Lennihan...