In high school, at Marymount in Santa Barbara, I was in a small class of young women.  Our teacher-nuns decided to put on the play “The Lark” by Jean Anouilh.  I was given the role of Warwick, who was the British supervisor of the trial of Joan of Arc, in the mid 1400s, in France.

Just recently, I found a cache of letters my sisters and I had sent to our parents, who were on a trip in Europe.  I mentioned my theatre practice, and that the sister in charge of us was asking me to be more masculine and to show more authority.  I loved that play, and the words I got to say contained the title.  “The girl was a lark over the skies of France.”   I grappled with being from an all-girl family (admittedly the bossy older sister) playing the role of Warwick, with masculine energy and authority.  

Many years later, (about 20 years ago, I think), someone brought forth a copy of  the silent film of the Passion of Joan of Arc, made by the Danish filmmaker Carl Dreyer, in 1928.  It was so intensely beautiful, and hard to watch, but then a musician at the Cabrillo music festival set the movie to music.  Our local choral people got to sing it, and I was present at the local premier.   The composer, Richard Einhorn, did a marvelous job.   It is profoundly moving, to hear fabulous and complex choral music paired with a classical silent film based on the innocent suffering of a saint.  It deepened my awe for Joan of Arc, for what she did for France.

After “The Lark”, to which we won a small bonfire of acclaim,  as a senior in High School, I was in a single act play for one actress, called. “Sorry, Wrong Number” by Lucille Fletcher.  This play starts with a woman in her bed at night answering the phone and overhearing a plan to murder someone.  Slowly and fiercely the tension is turned up, as she realizes she is the target of the plan.  I got much critical acclaim in our little community for this role, also, though it was somewhat emotionally draining, and very intense.  

So when I got to college,  I thought it would be fun to join the theatre for a play, and the play that I auditioned for as a freshman, in 1968-9 was “Marat-Sade”.   This is the short name for the whole name of the play, which is “The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat, as performed by the inmates of the asylum of Charenton, under the direction of the Marquis de Sade.”  by Peter Weiss.  Our theatre director had really wanted to work with this play, and none of us had any idea of what it was about.  When we got to the rehearsal room, he told us that it was a play about the French Revolution, as acted by inmates of an insane asylum to  which the Marquis de Sade had been committed.  The themes of the play were grappling with the revolution, and the murder of Marat, who had been the head of the reign of terror, as he tried to eliminate all the aristocrats who they thought had been the root cause of the revolution.  The sung refrain in the play is “Marat, we’re poor, and the poor stay poor. Marat don’t make us wait any more. We want our rights, and we don’t care how: we want our revolution NOW.” SO our theatre director’s way of choosing the “chorus” for the play was to ask us to practice being theatrically insane, such that we could each be seen in our own little boxes, at the back of the stage, (very like what a zoom screen looks like now), with about 20 people in little boxes like cages, about 4’ by 4’, sitting cross-legged, or kneeling, or dangling their legs over the edge, where each one is in his or her own world of insanity.  All of the actors in the play, when we performed it, wore white padded long tunics for clothing and white padded long, over-the knee boots, and their faces were a mask of white make-up.  

In the room where we were practicing acting insane, some were howling, some were groaning, and many were writhing.  Some got down into a fetal position and curled up in a posture of acute paranoia and almost catatonia.  A few were lashing out.  One guy was dramatically lascivious toward the women. One woman sat in the corner drooling, with her arms going up and down like she was trying to draw out spirits from a dream-hole we couldn’t see, in a sort of slow balletic rhythm.  

My response to this was to walk around wringing my hands, saying to myself and to anyone listening “Oh, my God, what can I do to help here?”  It was beyond endurance.  I think we stopped this acting after about  2 hours.  I think the director was trying to see if we could keep it up for the actual length of the play.  

I was accepted into the cast.  The director continued to work with each of us, to polish our spontaneous acting.  My role was to be a Sister of Mercy, with the wide white winged-headdress of the nuns, a grey loose robe, and a long big wooden rosary at the waist.  My hands were to be continually wringing, in between tasks, or tolling the rosary beads; and every once in a while I was to say, somewhat Sotto Voce, “Lord, forgive us for we know not what we do.”   This was not hard to say, in the context of the play.  My main task was to try to keep the lascivious hands of the lecher off of Charlotte Corday.  Also, I was on the side of the stage folding laundry, maintaining a small rhythm of sanity in the madhouse.  The play began with a woman screaming a long blood-curdling scream in one corner, while I folded the laundry and acted like this was normal. It was electrifying, and gut-punching.   Occasionally someone in the patients group would climb down from their box, and I was to carefully and tenderly guide them back.  Meanwhile Marat was in his bath in the center of the stage, and occasionally he would get out to go to his desk, or have a board brought to set across the bathtub, to give him a surface for writing another edict or order for execution.   The bathwater was imaginary. We even had real wooden tumbrils for the king and queen, rolling across the stage to their executions; manned by the patients like big wheelbarrows.    

We got rave reviews across the Bay area.  No one could believe the college players could do such a rivetingly intense job, and the theatre was packed for all the performances.  

Our school work was like eating oatmeal after doing this play day after day, night after night.  I was emotionally overwrought by it, and when it was over, I decided I could not stay in theatre, and successfully do my college work.  

So that was the end of my theatre career.  It also occurs to me now that I am in my 70s, that the lines I said in the play have still been very easy for me to say often, and my hands often reach for a rosary. My faith has been tested but has held through all these decades. I tried to take care of the people who are suffering as well as I could; and I am very afraid of both madness, and revolution. There is also a weird resonance with the play about Joan of Arc; and the question of saintliness, martyrdom, and a calling that to many seemed not only extraordinary but insane. Archetypes who are both realistic and mystical still hold my attention. Intense and contradictory emotions and ideas which don’t fit easily into neat categories seem most real to me.