In 1456, 25 years after Joan of Arc had been burned at the stake, the Catholic Church launched a re-trial into the heretical charges against her and declared her innocent. Jane Anderson, an Emmy-winning screenwriter and director, read the transcripts of the hearing and was struck by the testimony of Isabelle Romèe, the mother of Joan of Arc. She began, “I had a daughter once…”“I found that so unbelievably moving and truly heart-breaking,” observes Anderson of the words which inspired “Mother of the Maid,” her new play which is currently enjoying a world premiere engagement through September 6 at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts. In the drama, directed by Matthew Penn, Tina Packer plays Isabelle, who is at first flummoxed and then thrilled when she realizes that God has chosen her daughter for a special and divine destiny. When events begin to sour, after the triumphant victories against the English and the coronation of the Dauphin, Isabelle is horrified that she has lost Joan not only to France but also to a God and saints who appear indifferent to her daughter’s suffering. Anderson, who was raised in Northern California and is not Catholic, says that she didn’t set out to satirize religion, although the work is rather wry. In a recent conversation, the screenwriter (“Olive Kitteridge,” “The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader Murdering Mom”) says that she was more interested in juxtaposing domestic family relationships — the love of a mother for her child — against the weight of divine mandate.How did your relationship with your son influence the writing? When I was my son’s age, in my early 20s, I wanted to be Joan of Arc. I regarded that icon as a symbol of getting out of the house, having this degree of independence and doing great and outrageous things in the world. But as soon as I became a mother, I suddenly understood what a burden Joan must’ve been for her family. I became aware of how emotionally difficult it was to allow your child to go off and do something you consider dangerous and outrageous.Did you yourself do something outrageous? I dropped out of college and moved to Manhattan to become an actress. That was pretty outrageous to my family.Did that prove a burden to your mother? I was a gay child, I always wanted to wear boys’ clothes and was a tomboy, and my mother did her best to be tolerant and allow me to have creative freedom and to be who I was. But I know it was very hard for her to have an only daughter that other mothers’ thought was odd. “A strange daughter,” as your play describes Joan?Yes. “A strange daughter.” I felt that part of my mother’s pain through most of my childhood and teenage years.Were Isabelle’s expectations that Joan marry and pop out babies? It was more than that. My portrait of Isabelle is of a woman who has a native intelligence and a need for human connection. Yes she wants grandchildren, but once she realizes that her daughter is special and that people in power think she’s special, then she starts to get excited that her daughter will do things beyond what Isabelle could ever hope to do or be allowed to do. She begins to live through her daughter, which is a very human thing.Is Isabelle jealous of St. Catherine, who appears to Joan and seems to dominate her? Very much so. St. Catherine symbolizes that passion, that love interest, that dangerous element in your kid’s life that you wish wasn’t there. I like the metaphor that going into the ecstatic religious state is very similar to the ecstatic sexual state. Many young women in medieval times, and there are, I’m sure, young women now, who come to Jesus or find a charismatic religious leader because it’s a very compelling and often sexual experience. She’s lost her daughter to this saint but she’s also a religious woman and she has to go along with it.You make the point that parents are often helpless in controlling their children’s fate. Yes, and this child doesn’t end up getting their heart broken or arrested for drunk driving. No, this child ends up getting burned alive at the stake. I was very excited to use the metaphor of the Joan of Arc story as an extreme example of the hazards and the agony of parenting.You describe St. Catherine and Mary beneath the cross as “indifferent and serene” to human suffering. Yes, we all pray to God or Buddha or Jesus in the hope that our prayers will be answered, but I believe that we have to answer them ourselves. I’m more of a Buddhist — life is good, life is bad. And it’s our job to observe it in a state of neutrality and serenity. When the marvelous things happen, you express gratitude to the universe and enjoy it to the fullest. When crappy things happen, you find the lesson in it, you move on and you turn it into something useful.Are you making the case that Joan of Arc was complicit in the saints abandoning her at the end? I felt that it was important that St. Catherine didn’t abandon her. The channels simply closed for Joan. She kissed so much royal ass and sent so many men to their deaths that her channels simply closed. It was Joan’s openness, naiveté, and innocence that invited the holy visions in, and it was Joan’s worldliness that shut them out. I think our channels do close as adults. We’re all trying to find our way back to that blessed state of innocence and acceptance.At the end of the play, Isabelle says, rather bitterly, that Joan didn’t need to conjure up saints when she had the beauty of her hometown of Doremy all around her.The last line of the play, “All this is pure goodness.” It’s really about Isabelle trying to figure it out. She was raised as a good medieval woman who had to follow what her church told her. You say your novenas and a certain number of Hail Marys and you will reach a state of goodness and holiness. What Isabelle figures out is that true spirituality and true connection to one’s heart, faith, and form of God is through the beauty of nature. I’ll confess that’s my own personal philosophy. Nature mesmerizes me. That’s when I find myself most at peace. I figured Isabelle found that as well.
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