Word: shaw
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Saint Joan (by Bernard Shaw*) boasts a title role that is one of the great acting challenges of the modern theater. None of the actresses who have played Shaw's Joan on Broadway-Winifred Lenihan, Katharine Cornell, Uta Hagen-has left a lasting stamp upon the role. At the off-Broadway Phoenix Theater last week, Irish Actress Siobhan (pronounced Shiv-awn) McKenna brought something a good deal more memorable to it. Her thick-brogued, almost blatantly peasantlike Joan was all drive and no dreaminess. She had an unshakable faith in her voices and her mission because it could never...
This is a real achievement, because-though to say so may be a worse heresy than anything Joan was tried for-as a dramatic creation, Shaw's character in large measure fails. As a dialectical creation, his Joan is superb, just as the massively symbolic, impartially delineated conflict between Joan and the church, the sovereign self and the sovereign institution, inner light and outer law. is magnificently projected. But Shaw did not solve his problem of making Joan personally real by making her slangily realistic and outwardly much like other people. Her reality lay in how she differed from...
Very possibly Shaw's finest play, Saint Joan is yet one of his most uneven. The first third is little more than competent chronicle play; it is not till the second third that it becomes vibrantly Shavian; and not till the final third that it grows demonstrably great. At the Phoenix a generally torpid production stressed the play's long, slow climb before achieving-in the Trial Scene and the Epilogue-one of the great peaks of 20th century stage writing...
...rating preeminence. Splashiest of all will probably be onetime Vaudeville Hoofer Walter Winchell as host of his own variety show early next month. Paul Douglas will join Mary Martin, biggest audience-puller on TV. in Born Yesterday on Hallmark Hall of Fame, which will also repro cruce Shaw's Man and Superman with
...warmly received, but not all appreciated his japeries. When he met some prominent Irishmen, his notion of humor was to sing a funny song about Christ walking on the water. Lewis insisted on doing imitations at dinner, and they went on too long. He even fancied he resembled Bernard Shaw and bought a wig at Clarkson's", the theatrical wigmaker, to improve his Shaw impersonation (the older clown was not amused...