Glenn Close pulls all emotive stops out—some rarely pulled out—as the maid’s stalwart mother in Jane Anderson’s Mother of the Maid. If you haven’t already guessed, the maid here is the legendary Maid of Orléans, more commonly spoken of as Joan of Arc.
In the production, directed with fervor by Matthew Penn at the Public, the maid is specifically identified as Joan Arc (Grace Van Patten)—with Close as Isabel Arc, who runs a respected farm with her husband Jacques Arc (forceful Dermot Crowley). A large sheep herd is their primary revenue raiser, although no sheep dog is present.
A far from glamorous 15th-century farmer’s wife may not be the role ticket buyers would immediately think of as one Close might cotton to. Then again, since her most prominent early stage role was as a cross-dresser in The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs, she could be assumed as game for anything.
[Read Elysa Gardner’s ★★★★★ review here.]
Close certainly gives her aggressive all as a religious woman of modest but sustainable means who at first doesn’t believe her daughter’s claim of seeing and hearing St. Catherine. When convinced, however, by local Father Gilbert (Daniel Pearce) that the saint’s message about Joan’s saving France from the English is legitimate, Isabelle becomes her daughter’s greatest champion—as perhaps only a mother with a fierce will can be.
At an earlier time, critics might have categorized Mother of the Maid as a vehicle, meaning it exists not so much for its literary merit as it is a showcase for the headlining actor. The appellation wouldn’t be wrong now, either.
Close—wearing modest clothes but for a brief dressed-up sojourn in the Dauphin’s court (Jane Greenwood is the costumer)—is entirely convincing as an illiterate woman fighting for her daughter’s destiny and against her husband’s inclination not to accept the exalted, fateful mission.
Isabelle is all but undaunted backing Joan’s crusade to restore the (never seen here) Dauphin to the throne. She’s unrestrained when encouraging Joan to save her life by recanting and equally unrestrained when comforting the condemned 19-year-old now headed for the stake.
In other words and as Anderson intends it, Close is depicting a mother challenged to believe in and support her child as perhaps no mother in history other than Mary has been challenged. (The parallels between the two women of faith are hard to miss. Surely, Anderson doesn’t want them to be.)
But if Mother of the Maid is a vehicle for Close, it also serves as that for Van Patten. “Showy” merely begins to suggest what possibilities the role offers—and has over the years. Anderson’s Joan, whom the family knows as Joanie(!), is a hard-working girl with no qualms about speaking back to her elders.
She’s resolute as Joan usually is on the stage or screen—in, for instance, George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan and Jean Anouilh’s The Lark. But in Anderson, she’s also shown bordering on insufferable when she becomes a court regular and then on the verge of collapse in the minutes before her death.
Illustrating all these facets, Van Patten is outstanding. She is also remarkably thin, so thin that an observer may wonder whether she’s dieted severely to play the part. When she exposes her back while donning the rough-hewn garment for her final moments, Van Patten looks, to use the cliché, all skin and bones.
Since something is known of the historical Arcs (is Arc the family name?), Anderson doesn’t manufacture the maid’s biography from whole cloth. Nevertheless in having Joan behave as she does when dictating a brazen letter to the English commander and, later, revealing terror when facing her death sentence, Anderson puts forth a Joan not previously seen often, or at all.
These are bold choices that, Anderson must know, may be resisted by patrons. Aside from watching the recantation that Joan succumbs to and then reverses, does anyone ever think of Joan as evincing less than uninterrupted courage? Nonetheless, more power to Anderson for going full throttle on those unfamiliar particulars.
Elsewhere in Mother of the Maid, it has to be reported that the playwright unfolds a sturdy story marching steadily along but not soaring. Why it remains grounded isn’t clear, but possibly it has to do with Anderson’s conscientiously adhering to the chronology of recorded history and to the events she fancies might have occurred along the way.
As a result, her drama is commendably earnest but only intermittently enthralling as Joan leaves the humble Arc cottage for eventual battle, lives at the monarch’s no-way-humble castle with the companionship of the idolizing Lady of the Court (a sincere and graceful Kate Jennings Grant) and, finally, is chained to await her trial and demise in a cold dungeon. All is accomplished within John Lee Beatty smartly unfolding set as lighted sympathetically by Lap Chi Chu’s lights.
The old saying has it that no man is a hero to his valet. Anderson does a creditable enough job of demonstrating that no daughter is a perfect heroine to her mother. Even if the daughter is an eventual saint, she’s a three-dimensional figure prompting her mother to act on as many maternal instincts as possible. Bravo to Close and Van Patten for absolutely putting that reality on prominent display.
Mother of the Maid opened October 17, 2018, at the Public Theater and runs to December 23. Tickets and information: publictheater.org
