The Story of Shaw's Saint Joan by Brian Tyson (review)

400 Book Reviews edges only New York theatre. With Joseph Wesley Zeigler (Regional Theatre, Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1973), he sees New York as the only possible site for a national theatre - indeed, its theatres collectively represent the centrality associated with such an institution - but he gives ample credit to the growing role of professional regional theatres in major cities throughout the country. Berkowitz points out that Broadway dominated the American theatre at midcentury, a situation modified by the efforts of such people as Margo Jones in Pasadena, Nina Vance in Houston, Zelda Fichandler in Washington, D.C. , and Herbert Btau and Jules Irving in San Francisco. Berkowitz moves from one regional theatre to the next, remarking on the principals and productions, culminating his discussion in comments about the beginnings ofsubsidized theatre in America in 1957. As the only recognized home of the legitimate theatre in the 1950'S and the still reigning theatre capital of the United States, New York is rightfully in the spotlight of Berkowitz's study, and his historical tracing of the development of off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway is particularly useful. Though necessarily selective, the chronology includes virtually every significant force in the New York alternative theatre, including Joseph Cino, whose Caffe Cino gave birth to off-off-Broadway; Julian Beck and Judith Malina, whose Living Theatre productions in the 1960's revolutionized the nature ofthe dramatic script; Ellen Stewart and Tom O'Horgan, whose productions at La Mama made self-consciousness a staple of the theatre; and playwrights Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson, and David Mamet, whose work offered a clear alternative to the legshows of Broadway. Broadway, too, receives intelligent treatment in a chapter that moves from David Merrick to the Times Square Ticket Booth, analyzing musical and dramatic trends along the way. This capsule history of the recent American theatre offers a living portrait of a vital art fonn that has shown steady growth in the last thirty years. New Broadways is the kind of easy background reading students of theatre and drama will applaud. JUNE SCHLUETER, LAFAYETTE COLLEGE BRIAN TYSON. The Story oj Shaw's Saint Joan. Kingston, Ont. and Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press 1982. Pp. ix, 142, illustrated. $20 (CAN). Here is an entire (though brief) book devoted to a single work, and it limits its scope to the history of Shaw's history play. Professor Tyson tells the "story" of the play: the circumstances of its rise, in an account of what led Shaw to write a play about Joan; details about its execution, in an account of Shaw's revisions and his use ofsources; and - as a sort of epilogue - the attempts of critics to respond to the play, in an account of reviews of early perfonnances and references to some later critical treatments. Although there is nothing in the book that is likely to have a great effect on a reader's understanding of Saint Joan, " there is a useful discussion of the shorthand manuscript in the British Library, which Tyson has had transcribed for him. This is the book's main contribution to Shaw studies. and we may see it in the context of Dan H. Laurence's recent facsimile edition of fourteen of Shaw' s play manuscripts, which included - apart from Widowers' Houses and HeartbreakHouse-only the longhand manuscripts. Tyson makes good use of the SaintJoan manuscript, comparing it with the published text ofthe Book Reviews 401 play and demonstrating the sureness of Shaw's dramatic touch in the revisions. ]n the shorthand version of the Court scene at Chinon, for example, Joan is dispirited by the Dauphin's pusillanimous attitude: "I came to give you courage; and now you have taken away mine," she says to him. "The world has gone grey for me." Shaw recognized that this was inappropriate to "the romance of her rise" (as he summarized the early scenes of the play in his Preface), and he changed the ending of the scene from one of near discouragement to one of triumphant assertion as Charles is partly transformed, in a true miracle, and La Hire and the knights pledge themselves to follow Joan to Orleans. Tyson notes that the...