New Joan of Arc (sort of) emerges in OTP show
The production sets the action in Oakland amid protests, unrest
Lisa Ramirez’s new play “sAiNt jOaN (burn/burn/ burn)” with Oakland Theater Project isn’t really about Joan of Arc, at least not exactly.
And it’s definitely not an adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s similarly named play “Saint Joan.” It takes place among a small group of present-day Oakland teenagers taking refuge in a candle factory warehouse after police descend upon a Black Lives Matter protest.
Playwright and performer Ramirez is the associate artistic director of Oakland Theater Project, formerly Ubuntu Theater Project. Co-artistic director Michael Socrates Moran directs “sAiNt jOaN,” and Ramirez says that when she met Moran early in the com- pany’s existence in 2015 they quickly formed a strong artistic connection.
“My friend Sarita Ocon was in the version of ‘Waiting for Lefty,’ and I had been visiting from New York,” Ramirez recalls of the ensemble drama, which centers on a taxi drivers’ strike. “And I thought, ‘Oh God, why are they doing ‘Waiting for Lefty’? And then I went to go see this production in an antique car warehouse, and I was completely blown away. It was all different colors and sizes and genders, and it was in the round and very bare-bones, and the direction and the acting was phenomenal. So I just was like, ‘Who directed this?’ Michael was there because
he was also in it. And I introduced myself and I said, would you be willing to meet for coffee and talk? I hadn’t seen anything like that in a long time.”
The company soon went on to produce Ramirez’s solo show “Exit Cuckoo (nanny in motherland)”
and her plays “To the Bone” and “Down Here Below.” She also starred as Blanche in OTP’s 2018 production of “A Streetcar Named Desire” and as the solo performer in “The Waste Land” earlier this year.
Ramirez grew up in Berkeley and is now largely based in the Bay Area again after an 18-year stint in New York — as much as a theater artist is ever truly rooted anywhere, anyway.
“We were on a Zoom staff meeting planning the season, and Michael was trying to think of shows that we could make into solo shows. And then he said, well, what about Shaw’s ‘Saint Joan’?
And I got super annoyed. I was like, (expletive) Shaw! What about Lisa Ramirez’s ‘Saint Joan’? If we’re going to do ‘Saint Joan,’ let’s do the youth of today, the Joans of today. Because I was so inspired by the George Floyd protests. And Michael was like, Yeah, if you’re up for it.’”
Originally, Ramirez thought they’d be performing in the parking lot of the FLAX Building in Oakland, where this season’s early drive-in theater productions were staged. But when OTP opted to return to its usual former warehouse performance space inside the building, that changed the
premise of her play.
“I had this scene written, these young women were playing Double Dutch on a playground,” Ramirez says. “And then once I found out that it could be inside, then I shifted the whole thing. And it turned out they didn’t really know each other at all.”
Ramirez says she interviewed the cast, a multiethnic group of five young people, and used a few elements of their lives for inspiration in creating the fictional characters — a similar process to what she had done for “Down Here Below,” her 2019 adaptation of Maxim Gorky’s 1902 play “The Lower Depths,” which
follows a group of poor Russians living in a shelter.
“I’ve been obsessed with Joan of Arc since I was young,” Ramirez says. “My sister is named after Joan of Arc, and I was as a child very upset that I didn’t get that name, because I thought I was way more Joan of Arc-y than my sister. Just her bravery, the fact that she was so young and so poor and able to listen to a higher calling at that age. And with this particular generation, the higher calling is justice.”