Review: Glenn Close Raises a Saint in ‘Mother of the Maid’

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/17/theater/mother-of-the-maid-review-glenn-close.html

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Gliding into her 70s, Glenn Close is in her prime. Her performance in Jane Anderson’s four-handkerchief “Mother of the Maid,” at the Public Theater, is a triumphant blend of sharp sense and passionate sensibility, of an old pro’s expertise and a newcomer’s enthusiasm.

This production, which opened on Wednesday night under Matthew Penn’s lucid direction, is Ms. Close’s second interpretation of a script by Ms. Anderson, who wrote the screenplay for her current film “The Wife.” In that movie — which has sparked talk of another Oscar nomination (her seventh) for Ms. Close — she offers equally dazzling evidence of the more subliminal skills of screen acting.

But if you want to see a bona fide stage star at the height of her powers, drawing energizing sustenance from an audience’s rapt attention, “Mother of the Maid” is the ticket for you. Ms. Anderson’s robustly sentimental play, a take on a saint-in-the-making from a parent’s perspective, provides an old-fashioned showcase for the kind of acting with a capital A that once had Broadway theatergoers queuing around the block for returns.

There was a time when Ms. Close would have been a natural for the Maid of the title. That’s Joan of Arc, the teenage French warrior and holy avatar, who is played here most credibly by a rough-hewed Grace Van Patten. In her early film career, in works like “The World According to Garp” and “The Natural,” Ms. Close was celebrated for her wholesome radiance and clean-scrubbed, androgynous beauty.

Such traits are indeed the classic stuff of the Maid of Orleans in the theater, in performances by the likes of Julie Harris (in Jean Anouilh’s “The Lark” in 1955) and Condola Rashad (in Shaw’s “Saint Joan” last season). Ms. Close, of course, went on to exchange her dewy glow for a more feverish wattage, playing glamorous, strategizing villains in “Fatal Attraction” and “Dangerous Liaisons,” as well as the deluded movie goddess in the musical “Sunset Boulevard,” which she memorably reprised on Broadway last year.

For Ms. Anderson’s new play, Ms. Close has shed all vestiges of surface sophistication to portray the humble but formidable, earthy but pious Isabelle Arc, a 15th-century mom to an exceptionally gifted and headstrong daughter. It’s easy to see where her Joanie gets her strength and incandescence — I mean, aside from a France-loving God.

The premise of “Mother of the Maid” is smart, simple and encapsulated in its high-concept title. Ms. Anderson — whose credits include the play “Defying Gravity” and the HBO series “Olive Kitteridge” — revisits the well-plowed terrain of Joan’s path to martyrdom from the point of view of her proud but understandably fearful mom.

What, after all, does a mother do when her adolescent daughter announces — with an age-appropriate mix of uneasiness and defiance — “Ma, I’m having holy visions?” Isabelle is both skeptical and empathic, wondering if Joan’s state of mind isn’t a byproduct of sexual awakening. And this being rustic, Renaissance-era France, Isabelle isn’t shy about making such a diagnosis.

One of the strengths of Ms. Anderson’s script is its insistence on its leading characters’ connection to the land and the facts of a life that was often short and brutal. Listen, for example, to Joan’s account of the sensual heightening that occurs when she is visited by her heavenly guide, Saint Catherine.

“The sounds around me, they get loud,” Ms. Van Patten’s Joan says with a perfect matter-of-fact astonishment. “Birds, cicadas, the bees in the clover, the sheep grinding their teeth.” She continues, “It all gets very large, you see. And wondrous. Even the dung balls on the sheep’s arses are gorgeous to me.” She sums up Saint Catherine’s effect on her in words that bring to mind a latter-day Katy Perry fan: “She fills me, she slays me, she takes me apart.”

The balance here between contemporary vernacular and period detail is far more adroit than in the earlier version of “Mother” I saw at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Mass., three years ago. That production featured a now excised character, Saint Catherine, as a wisecracking narrator, glibly pointing out the differences between then and now.

Isabelle’s story doesn’t need meta-theatrical touches. And as Joan marches on to predetermined glory and doom, the revised script avoids irony for a more conventional account guaranteed to push the emotional buttons of any parent who has felt equal elation and terror as she watches her child grow up. Ms. Anderson doesn’t break new ground in exploring those reactions. But sometimes context can make the hoary feel bracingly fresh.

Mr. Penn makes the most of that context’s novelty without overselling it. John Lee Beatty’s rustic set (which shifts neatly to royal sumptuousness for later scenes at the Dauphin’s court), Jane Greenwood’s homespun costumes and Alexander Sovronsky and Joanna Lynne Staub’s sound design summon a world in which people are unavoidably subject to the whims of nature. And Lap Chi Chu’s lighting speaks of a time when a shaft of sun, or the sight of a loved one wreathed in candlelight, might be perceived as a heavenly communication.

The supporting cast does well by Ms. Anderson’s conversational, expletive-laced dialogue, in which the possibilities of barbaric invasion and divine intervention are regarded as everyday possibilities. Andrew Hovelson is spot on as Joan’s loutish brother, riding a gravy train to fame by association; so is Kate Jennings Grant as the patronizing, well-intentioned Lady of the Court, who treats Isabelle the way a Hollywood studio assistant might deal with the down-home relatives of a fledgling movie star.

Dermot Crowley is excellent as Joan’s father, Jacques, an unlettered, strap-wielding patriarch whose suspicions of his daughter’s voices are never entirely quelled. His final, third-person monologue, in which he traces his character’s last days following Joan’s death, is a heartbreaker.

As for Ms. Close, there’s not a breath or utterance that doesn’t seem both carefully premeditated and absolutely in the moment. She endows her Isabelle with a superstitious peasant woman’s trepidation in the face of the unknown and a mother’s doubts-vanquishing protectiveness.

When Joan is imprisoned by the English, Isabelle is as frightened as she is fierce. But, as in the melodramas that were once bread-and-butter to great popular actresses, it’s the maternal fierceness that prevails. When, in her wrenching final soliloquy Ms. Close’s Isabelle talks about shaking her fists at God, you can’t help feeling that the Almighty had better take cover.