Off Broadway Review: ‘Mother of the Maid’ Starring Glenn Close

After a disastrous foray into the world of Joan of Arc with the musical “Joan of Arc: Into the Fire,” the Public Theater makes an ill-advised return to the subject with its new production of Jane Anderson’s play “Mother of the Maid” — the story of Joan’s beleaguered mom, fiercely played by the commanding Glenn Close. Focusing on the complex travails of parenting, the play still comes down to women suffering grittily. But it’s a tiresome road to that inevitable outcome.

Here, Isabelle Arc (Close) is sometimes narrating, sometimes living the remarkable discovery that her heretofore unremarkable daughter Joanie (Grace Van Patten) has had a miraculous vision of Saint Catherine and intends to lead an army into battle against the English invaders, with the blessing of the Dauphin of France. Isabelle and her husband Jacques (Dermot Crowley) are simple farmers, devout in their faith in God but struggling to believe their Joan. They’re soon thrust into a larger world of bishops, nobles, celebrity and power, which they can barely grasp and are reticent to trust.

The play dabbles in kitchen-sink (well, medieval-washbasin) drama, situation comedy, awkward mysticism and painfully self-serious memoir. Mixing anachronistic dialogue and accents (suggesting some kind of 1950’s working-class schmoes from the Brooklyn of… France?), heavy-handed interstitial music and a visual style still rooted in the 1400’s, director Matthew Penn’s production unhappily straddles old and new. Sometimes creative juxtapositions can enlighten, but here the tone and approach zig and zag in conflicting directions, making it neither satisfying comedy nor drama.