click to enlarge

If no one but Magali Naas (pictured, photo by Jeff Young Photography) and Giles Davies were performing in Jean Anouilh’s The Lark at Gorilla Theatre, this production might be one of the great triumphs of the decade. As Joan of Arc, Naas is luminous: she dominates her scenes with a sweetness and purity that’s almost angelic, almost as ethereal and inexorable as the disembodied voices she claims to hear. French-born herself, Naas is splendid as the storied Maid, demonstrating a talent far beyond even what she showed several seasons ago in Tommy J and Sally at the Studio@620. As Warwick, the Englishman who wants Joan dead and forgotten, Davies is also superb, though in an entirely different way. He seems to have stepped out of the 15th century onto the stage, and when he calls his prisoner “a dirty virgin witch girl,” you have no doubt that he’d dispatch her himself, if Merrie Olde England would let him. Anytime either of these actors is center stage, Anouilh’s play is riveting. What we’re blessed with in both cases is formidable, intelligent, and, most important, persuasive acting. Surely the real Joan and Warwick were something like this.

But

there are nine other actors in this busy play, and that’s a problem. Not one of them is at the level of Naas or Davies, not even the old dependables like Chris Rutherford, Slake Counts or Josh Goff. Oh, there are moments: Rutherford almost shows three dimensions as silly King Charles VII, Counts intermittently shows us the cruel, arrogant certainty of the Inquisitor, Goff has a few moving seconds as Joan’s comrade Captain La Hire. But in other cases, the actors aren’t even occasionally credible, and there’s seldom the feel of an artistic ensemble, sharing a single vision. When so many characters are incompletely imagined, I have to wonder if director Nancy Cole just ran out of rehearsal time. It wouldn’t be the first time that a director discovered that three weeks with a large cast means very few minutes per actor — only a fraction of what’s possible in a two-or-three-character piece. But whatever happened, The Lark is a casualty of the majority of its performers, and even Naas and Davies can’t make us forget so many problems. [dataBox]

The story of the play is Joan’s story: her adolescence in Domremy, the voices that tell her to lead France in battle against the English, and her difficulties in persuading the Dauphin Charles to trust her leadership. The chronicle of her victories isn’t given much stage time, but her trial for witchcraft is treated with some real attention to detail (and respect for the complicated historical record). All this is accomplished on Eric Haak’s wonderfully minimalist set, consisting of a long ramp rising along the whole length of the stage and a backdrop above which are several churchly arches. Jennifer Cunningham designed the fine period costumes, and Lynne Locher’s sound design is appropriately religious. There’s also some unconvincing choreography by Caroline Jett.

Still, even with its failings, it’s a pleasure to see anything by Anouilh on a local stage. Though not of the top rank of dramatists, he and other second-level Frenchmen like Giraudoux, Cocteau, Montherlant and Sartre wrote plays that have a lot to offer an intelligent audience. So let’s hope that The Lark starts a trend in Bay area theater.