Review: Glenn Close Raises a Saint in ‘Mother of the Maid’

I have long considered Glenn Close to be the successor to Katharine Hepburn, and the challenger to Meryl Streep for the throne of the greatest living actress. Or perhaps she is more like the great Julie Harris.

The play's a nice idea, and the second act is stronger than the first, which is a stupefying mixture of situation comedy, out of whack language ("wonky," "get off me," etc), and facts that anyone who knows anything about Joan certainly knows. I have no idea which Joan Ben saw; the one he describes wasn't the performance I saw - she was amateurish, shrill, adolescent, petulant, and actually pretty stupid. As for Close, she's magnificent, filling every hole in that act with humor and grace and love. Once we got to the second act, though, with Isabelle tending her daughter before the execution, I thought, this is where the play should have started. Here. Magnificent. (Admittedly, this would have endangered the structure of having the Arc family members turning into historians, with Jacques Arc's last speech (Ben is right on about that) in some danger of being lost. However, the truths unveiled about Isabelle Arc in the last two minutes would, dramatized, have given a scene where Glenn Close confronts the pope, fighting for her daughter's clearance and truth, something no dramatist has done (that I know of). It's always the "arc" of Joan hears voices, Joan fights the enemy, Joan gets burned. I loved Close here; and it's a privilege to watch her work close up; but I do wish she'd had a better vehicle and that the playwright had shown a little more courage. But a Close play in the so-called "me too" time...our critic here was a little too beside himself.

She's always been the real deal, even supporting Jim Dale in "Barnum." Remembering when Glenn Close was a nearly-insane box office draw, even Hugh Jackman level. We’d finally given up on seeing “Death and the Maiden” two years before "Sunset Boulevard" in the 1990s, and this time, we planned well in advance. We were in our seats for “Sunset Boulevard” ($75 - each!!) and were settled in, front row mezz, so we’d have a perfect unblocked view of her and the famous hovering staircase. A very nice lady was edging in with her husband and daughter, looked at her tickets; the row was filled up, we all overacted confusion with our hands, wondering where she was going. She said “These are our seats.” A house person came over and asked when we bought ours, I looked at our tickets and said August. Then the house person asked the very nice lady when she bought hers, and she said yesterday (not realizing everyone there had bought a very long time ago). After clarifying that she wasn’t an extra-extra-special VIP, the house person suddenly got it, looked at the tickets and said: “Of course, if you just bought them yesterday - look, they’re for a year from now.” Her husband and daughter looked at her, then they edged out. We hoped they had time to get to another show. She’s hoped to unseat us, but was very nice otherwise, and we thought of her when someone realized there was no way she’d be seeing Glenn Close still in a year. We were all even more excited to be there!

I was disappointed by this play which had too many scenes that could have come from a sitcom. For example, when Jaon's family spent time in the royal court, the playwright thought that the more jokes she included about country bumpkins encountering city sophisticates, the better.