Saint Joan by George Bernard Shaw October 28, 2010

Saint Joan
by George Bernard Shaw

Stage Manager Tyrus Holden Costumes by Thomas Kleinert Photography and Postcard Design by Sean MacBride Murray Videography by Joe Sebring Original Music by Cory Hibbs

Tickets $15 Adv - $18 Door
Available online www.thequeensplayers.com Reservations/Inquiries 718 392 0722

An approved Actors Equity Showcase
In 1431 Jeanne d’Arc – a young peasant girl who led an army and crowned a king – was burned at the stake as a heretic. Afterwards, in the smoldering ashes, one thing remained untouched – her heart. In 1920 she was made a saint. In 1923 Bernard Shaw took her extraordinary story and brilliantly retold it, revealing it also as the beginning of a nationalism which dictated the very make-up of Europe until our own 20th-century apocalypse, World War I. Shaw’s play moves between the France of Joan’s War and WWI, asking all the while: if Joan were alive today, would we recognize her – and would we listen?

Shaw himself referred to the heroine of what many consider his greatest play as “the most notable Warrior Saint in the Christian calendar, and the queerest fish among the eccentric worthies of the Middle Ages.” Born circa 1412 and burned for heresy, witchcraft, and sorcery at the age of 19, Joan of Arc was canonized as a saint in 1920. Shaw’s 1923 play was instrumental in earning him the Nobel Prize two years later. Given his spectacular reputation as a freethinker and assassin of sacred cows, many feared that Shaw would satirize Joan or portray her as a fraud. Instead, without romanticizing her as a victim or tragic heroine, he paints her as a human being of unparalleled vision, courage, confidence, and imagination.

Rarely fully produced, due to the large number of male principal roles and complexity of the female lead, this Queens Players production will feature a full cast of 24, featuring Shelleen Kostabi in the famously challenging role of Joan, along with Bruce Barton, Logan Riley Bruner, David Douglas, Robert Eigen, Jonathan Emerson, Jaike Foley-Schultz, Cory Hibbs, Gary Lizardo, Graziany Miranda, Tim Moore, Alex Panich, Kurt Roediger, Greer Samuels, Josh Silverman, Camilla Skoglie, Eric Stephenson, Eric William Whitehead, Dalles Wilie and Jonathan Zipper.

The production is directed by Ken Neil Hailey, director of past QP productions of “The Importance of Being Earnest,” the multi-run hit, “Vampire Lesbians of Sodom & Sleeping Beauty or Coma” and our earlier Shaw production, “Mrs. Warren’s Profession.” This is Mr. Hailey’s 4th production of a Shaw work.
Enhancing the raw-space production will be costumes by Thomas Kleinert, resident costumer for the company and an original incidental music score by Cory Hibbs.