Gen Z grieves broken world in ‘Saint Joan’
“Saint Joan (burn/burn/burn)” might be set during a demonstration in Oakland in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, but a cacophony from a bad encounter with the police isn’t quite the first set of sounds you hear.
Instead, a soundscape of the show’s namesake pricks your ears first: church bells and horses, clanking sabers and roaring flames. It’s a canny move by sound designer Elton Bradman, suggesting that the righteous life-and-death battles of the saints aren’t just things of the past.
Not that the quintet of Oakland Theater Project’s world premiere, which opened Sunday, Nov. 14, at Oakland’s Flax Art & Design store, are saintly. Ducking into a candle warehouse to seek refuge from tear gas and worse, these five young people might have just attended the same march, but they’re hardly united. Each is holier than thou — May (Charlotte Ying Levy) with the environment; Bell (Success Ufondu) seeing racism’s tentacles everywhere; Angie
(Metsehafe
Eyob) rightly criticizes her big sister Bell’s bossy ways;
Sabra (Daniela
Cervantes) is keen to point out the unique dangers brown lives face; and then there’s the cryptic Jean
(Romeo Channer), with a backpack full of books on St. Joan.
All the world’s ills are all happening at once for this group. On top of police brutality and climate change, there is colonization and anti-Blackness, our dependency on digital technology, our stigmatization of mental illness, white socioeconomic privilege, and incidents of hate against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.
In another playwright’s hands, that would be a lot for 55 minutes. But Lisa Ramirez makes forcefully clear that too much all the time is a permanent condition for Generation Z and that it would be for the rest of us too if we weren’t accustomed to it to the point of blindness.
Ramirez has both a musician’s and a linguist’s ear for dialogue, and director Michael Socrates Moran conducts the friendly and unfriendly fire in her verbal score with dexterity and empathy. Her five youngsters can’t stop interrupting each other, and as they
Behind all the combustible energy, behind all the bluster and the sanctimony is profound grief for the broken world this generation has unfairly inherited.
ricochet around their holding pen, restless with anger and fear and adrenaline from the protest, their staccato exchanges hurtle them toward explosions.
Yet an otherworldly presence keeps asserting itself, first in the form of Karla Hargrave’s smart set design, which lines the venue with so many colorful devotional candles that each one looks from a distance like the incandescent spine of a thick hardcover tome in a religious library — a sacred space that induces an involuntary hush.
The hush also comes from Channer’s Jean, a trans character who, before the show begins, is already center stage in a slow-moving meditative bliss that’s impervious to the outside world. Even during the play, they’re in tune with the other characters only sporadically, hearing whispers and seeing lights the rest of the world can’t. Their seemingly nonsensical monologues further stoke the other characters’ smoldering feelings, making them doubt whether Jean’s even on the side of the George Floyd marchers.
But Jean’s mania unleashes more than frustration in everyone else. Behind all the combustible energy and the callouts, behind all the bluster and the sanctimony is profound grief for the broken world this generation has unfairly inherited.
Ufondu’s Bell, in particular, communicates this feeling with standout artistry. There’s a gorgeous moment when Bell reminds a crazed Jean that they’ve all been marching because an innocent Black man was killed by the police. “What?” Channer’s Jean says, as if they’ve just heard of such an atrocity for the first time and can’t fathom it. That should be how we all respond — we shouldn’t be so used to such heinous crimes — and Jean’s tearful bafflement resurfaces Bell’s own. Bell clings desperately to her rage at first, but she can’t withstand the fresh wave of heartache.
Jean hails from a long line of crazies qua seers in theater, and what strikes in “Saint Joan” isn’t that the other characters suddenly heed their vision, not exactly. The narrative more hinges on accepting Jean as a full viable member of the group, despite all the raving and self-harm. It’s not easy to unite even inside the candle warehouse, let alone to stand side by side to face what’s outside it. But “Saint Joan” makes a powerful case that if we are to confront the world’s catalog of afflictions, we must act hand in hand.