Music Credit: “NY” written and performed by Kosta T from the cd Soul Sand.

Dria Brown: When an audience is with you it is the greatest feeling in the world, and you can see it. I mean the audience is so close. I’m not gonna lie and say that I’m never looking at them to see how they’re responding. That would just be a big, big, big, big lie. And when they are with you and they feel the freedom to respond, I love that. Like last night, oh, you just feel so overwhelmed with pride and joy, and you can work better off of those feelings. <laughs> There is like a light that happens, and they’re really grateful and you’re grateful.

Jo Reed: That’s actor Dria Brown—she’s playing Joan in Bedlam’s production of George Bernard Shaw’s St. Joan, now playing at the Folger Theatre. Welcome to Art Works, the weekly podcast produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed.

George Bernard Shaw wrote St. Joan in 1923—492 years after she was burnt at the stake for heresy by the British and three years after she was canonized as a saint by the Catholic Church. So Shaw was telling a story that was both old and yet was as current as yesterday’s news. Bedlam’s staging of the play straddles the historic and the modern as well—it’s stripped down with minimal sets and costumes and a cast consisting of four actors—who are called upon to play 27 characters. The exception to this is Dria Brown who plays Joan and only Joan. Shaw’s play open when a teenage Joan who believes she hears voices from God telling her to drive the English from France persuades a French military officer to take her to the dauphin. Dria Brown plays her in this scene with palpable charm, wide-eyed innocence, and unshakeable confidence.

Dria Brown: I, Dria, am a very bubbly, charismatic person. And I’m from the South and a smile can get you anywhere in the South, and we just know it. And so I thought, how can I bring my Southern charm to Joan, because that’s a part of the battle is, how do you win people over with just being nice? And she’s positive and, you know, that gets you a long way. And I thought it would be interesting to kind of track her maturity through the play and not have her be the soldier from the beginning, because then there’s nowhere to go and it’s not fun. So I thought, how cool would it be to really think and embody that of a 17-year-old girl of that time, one who is very innocent and one who is from a very country place, as I am, and how would that affect the people around me? And when we first tried it, that positivity, that youthful energy really put a huge spark in the scene. It was just like, wow. One, there’s this girl who’s so excited about something that’s way over her head, and I thought that was really interesting, so I really wanted to just like capitalize on that and to just really make it my first thing, of being this innocent wide-eyed child who is naïve but who feels called to do something by one of the most important beings in her world. The faith of a mustard seed was something that I wanted to plant in that first scene.

Jo Reed: We do get to see her growth throughout that play the way you play her. And then of course the end at the trial.

Dria Brown: Right.

Jo Reed: It’s really hard to believe it’s the same girl who opened the play.

Dria Brown: Yeah, yeah, and having to keep that girl, too, because she has to be there, that positive, wide-eyed girl. That has to trickle in all of the play, of being very excited and very headstrong, and that’s where the petulance comes from, I think, and that’s Joan. It’s so well documented. People have talked about how she was a very emotional person. She was very loud. She was very rambunctious. She was very headstrong. She was fiery, and that type of energy I think inspires people to do whatever you want them to do if you’re good at it, and she was good at it.

Jo Reed: Was it hard for you to get your arms around the character?

Dria Brown: <sighs> When my agent sent me the email, they said, “Hey, you’re auditioning for this company called Bedlam. They’re doing ‘Saint Joan’ and ‘Hamlet.’” I was very excited about Hamlet, but I’d never heard of Saint Joan before. I grew up in a Southern Baptist church where my father is a minister, so we aren’t privy to a lot of the saints. And I read the play and I immediately just had such an emotional response. It resonated so deeply with me. It was very on the nose, all of the emotions, all of the anger. It was very easily accessible because it felt so close to home of just growing up in the church and really having a good handle on faith and being a tomboy. All of these things were just easily very accessible for me, so it wasn’t hard to connect to her at all, which has been quite a blessing, to be completely honest with you.

Jo Reed: It’s a play about many things, not the least of which, it’s a woman in a man’s world.

Dria Brown: Uh-huh.

Jo Reed: And except for a couple of the sort of tittering court ladies, she’s the only woman in the play.

Dria Brown: Right, yeah.

Jo Reed: So that must be as an actress a very interesting position to occupy.

Dria Brown: I love it.

Jo Reed: <laughs>

Dria Brown: And I couldn’t imagine this play any other way. If I had to deal with 27 men on stage, I was just thinking about the other night of like in my personal opinion how much that would take away, because these four men are able to embody all men, and with the audience being so close, it just makes everybody on one side, whether you like it or not, and then there’s Joan in the middle of everything. And being the only woman I keep mentioning Emma Gonzalez, the teenager who’s really like--

Jo Reed: Parkland.

Dria Brown: Yeah, in Parkland who’s just like leading her own troops to victory, is my Joan. She’s on my vision board for what my Joan would be, of just this really headstrong, fearless teenager, and that only works if you’re the only girl, because I’m not against any other woman on stage. There’s nothing to compare me to. There’s no other right way to be a woman except for me, because I’m the only woman on stage.

Jo Reed: Good point, yeah.

Dria Brown: And I think that that really—I don't know. There’s something about—every night we get a different response to Joan. Some people are on her side from the beginning. Some people are super-- you can tell some people are super annoyed by her in the beginning. But everybody’s on the same page in the inquisition, of just feeling for this teenager being on trial. And I don't think we would get that response, you would get that response if there were other women written in the play. There’s a greater humanity, a greater empathy that you have to have if there’s just one woman, I think, so I’m really happy that it’s being done that way. <laughs>

Jo Reed: I think, since you mentioned four people playing 25, let’s talk about how Bedlam’s production of “Saint Joan” is unique.

Dria Brown: Uh-huh. There are four of us. I am the only person who gets to play one role. The rest of the men divvy up 25 characters, maybe. I’m not really sure the exact number, but they divvy up a lot of people, and it is not hard to keep up. That specificity that they all have in each one of their characters makes it different people to fight against, different people to love every night, different people to share things with every night. They never kind of blur into one voice. It’s like all of the voices of the patriarchy at play. And it’s like a relay race. You’re super tired after the show and there’s no set. There are no beautiful costumes. It is plain Jane stripped down bare, and that really forces an audience to have to sit up and to be just as much as an active participant as we are on stage. They are fueling the show as we are fueling the show, and that’s what nice about what Bedlam does. And they’ve always done it that way. They keep it small because it’s about the story and it’s about the words and not about the beautiful set tied up behind or 27 people to kind of fall upon. You just have to be on every night because there are only four people on stage. Everything’s bare. You see everything, so you have to be on your P’s and Q’s at all time.

Jo Reed: What was rehearsal like? Did it get confusing when you first started rehearsing, like, “Wait a minute. Who are you now and what am I talking to?”

Dria Brown: <laughs> We actually had a very unique rehearsal experience. Before this I was on tour with Saint Joan and Hamlet playing like 12 roles in Hamlet and then one role in Joan. Every night I was in wrap. And we only had three weeks to do both shows, and Bedlam said, “Hey, you need to be off book for Hamlet and Saint Joan first day of rehearsal.” So we got one day of reading the play.

Jo Reed: It’s like opera. <laughs>

Dria Brown: Right. I was like, I don’t need to go to grad school anymore. I did grad school express. I’ve done it. I’ve graduated from Bedlam University.

Jo Reed: <laughs>

Dria Brown: I have my MFA. <laughs> It’s great. But the rehearsal process is like nothing I have ever experienced in my life of just reading the play once, which is never done. You always have like a couple of days of table reads to really flush it out and ask questions. But Eric has such a solid foundation because it’s been done so much that--

Jo Reed: And he’s the director.

Dria Brown: And he’s the director. And so he just tells you what the foundation is, and once that’s set and that’s comfortable and you got it, then you play with it. Then you mess it up a little bit. There is a foundation, and it’s fast. And I didn’t get confused just because those guys, man, are they specific with their accents, their dialects, their body language. It’s all very easy to see whose point of view is whose and they’re all very similar. And it’s Joan working towards the same thing, anyway. Every scene is a debate. She’s debating with someone every scene, so it’s like I know that as far as status comes, if I am talking to the archbishop, I have to be a little more reserved because I respect him as a religious figure so much. The rest of them are at the mercy of whatever flies out of Joan’s mouth.

Jo Reed: Now, in this production at The Folger, Eric Tucker is the director but also one of the actors, one of the other four. How was that rehearsal process?

Dria Brown: I love working with Eric so much. He’s so brilliant. He’s so good, and he’s one of those actors that you’re constantly learning from, just of how he works and the excitement that he has in his eyes. Eric is always changing things. You’ll do something for three days and he’ll come in and he’ll be like, “Yeah, okay, now I’m putting my director hat on. Scratch that. It’s not hard enough,” is his favorite thing to say. <laughs> “It’s not difficult enough,” even though there are four people playing 27 roles. “It’s not hard enough.” He is an amazing scene partner, just the way that he listens, and that sounds so cliché, but, really, acting is about listening, and there are people who really shut off and it’s about me, me, me, me, me. But when you have a group of selfless actors who are just really pining for newness every night and really demanding you to be your best every night, and I often forget that he is the director until I get notes in the morning, and it’s like, “Oh, yeah, he’s wearing three different hats at The Folger.” But I never—even in rehearsal there would be moments we’d be acting, we’d be finding something in the scene, and then he’d be like, “Okay, just for a second I need to put my director’s hat on.” Give us some notes about the scene. But there are notes for himself and there are notes for me, so it never feels like this elitist director who’s talking down to me. It’s like a company effort. He’s with you. He wants it to be the best that it is, and it’s been great. He’s been great, yeah.

Jo Reed: Now, you mentioned you’re from the countryside. You’re from South Carolina.

Dria Brown: Uh-huh, from South Carolina, from Winnsboro. Little, tiny, tiny place, yeah.

Jo Reed: Were you interested in theater when you were a kid?

Dria Brown: I wanted to be a neurosurgeon, and then my dad, he was like, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” And I was like, “A neurosurgeon.” I had to be like in the third grade. And he was like, “Do you want to be a neurosurgeon or do you want to pretend to be a neurosurgeon?” I was like, “I want to pretend to be a neurosurgeon.” My dad’s so—

Jo Reed: What a smart question.

Dria Brown: He’s so spot on. My dad is— oh, I love my parents so much. But they— my parents were the type where if you wanted to do something they were like, “Absolutely. Whatever you want to do. Amazing. You want to be a farmer? Let’s get you signed up for that. You want to do cheerleading? Let’s—you want to do boxing,” whatever. But when I said I wanted to be a doctor or a neurosurgeon, he was like, “I see you playing pretend a lot.” It was already ingrained in me. I was already making plays and shows. In the third grade, my cousins and I would put on full-blown productions of church, because that’s where we grew up. So we’d just imitate what we saw that Sunday morning and invite all of our family to come see it that evening, and it’d just be the church service, of us parodying <laughs> my dad as a pastor or whatever. And so officially I started in middle school with Julianne Rickenbaker, who’s now Julianne Neal at Fairfield Central High School in Winnsboro, South Carolina, and I did like all of the little plays and Black History Month programs, and I owe all of my artistic interest to her. She really saw something in me and was like, “I think you’d be good at this. And I don't know if you want to act or if you want to sing, but you’re really good at it. And if you want to give it a try, if you want to just have a trial period of trying it out, let’s figure it out.” And I fell in love with it. And then in the tenth grade, South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts & Humanities paid us a visit, and they were a really serious group of people, and I was like, I think I want to audition to go to boarding school for two years and to dedicate my life.

Jo Reed: Oh, it’s a boarding school?

Dria Brown: It’s a boarding school.

Jo Reed: Wow.

Dria Brown: It’s a residential program. It’s like LaGuardia but it’s residential, so you live there. And I’d never been away from home, and my mom and my dad said, “Let’s do the application process of that,” and I auditioned and I got in. And we were all very confused when I got in. I had like found a monologue on the internet and my teachers were like, “You’re not there yet, and that’s what we’re looking for. We’re looking for that potential. We don’t want anyone who’s great. Then there’s no point of going to school.” And I stayed there for two years and I had an amazing time and really developed a really cool craft, and just a lovely, lovely time for two years of straight acting and academics, and then I went to North Carolina School of the Arts. So I knew I wanted to be an actor from middle school. I just didn't know how serious of an actor I wanted to be, but I did know I wasn’t serious about being a neurosurgeon. Well, thanks, dad.

<laughter>

Jo Reed: What is it about theatre that speaks to you in that way? What did you find that you liked so much?

Dria Brown: I was just really surprised at how I could read a play, read someone else’s words and make them my own and figure out how they resonated with me. That was always something very interesting to me, of taking the monologue that felt so far away from me and figuring out how it was like me and not putting on anything, but really getting down to how do I identify with what this person is saying? And something about acting, of getting to be someone else for a second has always—that imagination, that inner child that comes to play when you’re acting was always something that was really fascinating to me. And it sounds so silly, but there’s something about acting that feels like therapy for me, of not necessarily being able to articulate what I want to say a lot of the times. I have a lot of trouble with that. And being able to read a play or a sonnet and being like, this speaks for me, or I can get down with that. I can get behind that. And seeing audience members have that same moment, have that same feeling and it resonating with them. And being able to just to justice to the words feels really good. It's just so much fun. It’s not tedious. It’s not arduous. It just feels like, "Oh, this is what I’m supposed to do. This is what I’m called do, like Joan." <laughs>

Jo Reed: Like Joan, three hours and 15 minutes of Joan.

Jo Reed: That is pretty arduous, Dria—

Dria Brown: Exactly.

Jo Reed: —I have to say. <laughs>

Dria Brown: I know, I know, but, you know, it’s worth it. It’s worth it.

Jo Reed: Now, you mentioned earlier, you really can feel the difference in audiences from one audience to another and it’s really palpable?

Dria Brown: Yeah. When an audience is with you it is the greatest feeling in the world, and you can see it. I mean the audience is so close. I’m not going to lie and say that I’m never looking at them to see how they’re responding. That would just be a big, big, big, big lie.

Jo Reed: <laughs>

Dria Brown: And when they are with you and they feel the freedom to respond, I love that. I’ve actually been thinking about, I’m like, how do I pitch myself as a day job of going in and teaching people how to be free in their responses when they watch theater? What is that job? I’m really interested in doing that. There are lot of people who have misconception about theater. You have to be very quiet and uptight, and for me theater is church, call and response. It is a Baptist church to me, because we are feeding off of your energy. And when it’s—

Jo Reed: But some people went to Episcopal Church.

Dria Brown: Exactly, so I’m always like, come join the Baptist church. Say amen.

Jo Reed: <laughs>

Dria Brown: Say something back. Laugh when you want to laugh. Clap when you want to clap. You are the missing element. There’s a missing character until the audience gets there.

Jo Reed: Absolutely.

Dria Brown: And when the audience is with you and rocking like last night, oh, you just feel so overwhelmed with pride and joy, and you can work better off of those feelings. <laughs> There is like a light that happens, and they’re really grateful and you’re grateful. And when an audience isn’t so much with you, it doesn’t mean necessarily that they don’t like it, but it really is like, you need to be very specific and you need to go back to the words and to listening, because they’re just a different type of audience. Maybe they’re internalizing it a different way. Maybe they’re intellectualizing it a lot, which is fine. You can't change a performance or get lazy if an audience isn’t responding the way you want them to respond, because that’s not theater. Theater is about the freedom of expression, the freedom of it resonating wherever it does. But I will say when an audience is with you and you can feel it, it is great. It is great.

Jo Reed: Especially in a theater like The Folger. It is such an intimate theater, and actors can, I mean, literally go back up into the balcony and into the audience. And in this production you also brought some of the audience--

Dria Brown: On stage.

Jo Reed: —onto the stage, so it seems I want to say more circular. <laughs>

Dria Brown: Exactly. I think Eric’s whole point is that the audience doesn’t get let off the hook with like, I bought my ticket. Now I relax. It’s like The Folger is so intimate, and the seating on stage, it’s like now these point of views that we’re putting out there could very well be your point of views. And at this time, because there are not 27 people on stage, you are a part of the show. In the inquisition the audience becomes the court, just as much a part of the court as the three gentlemen are.

Jo Reed: Yeah, I thought that was really smart.

Dria Brown: And I love that, of just it’s in the dark and I can't really see Eric or Sam or Ted, but I can see 100 plus audience members who could very well be saying those things to me, and it works in a very smart way, I think, and of just having them that close. And Joan constantly being in the middle fighting for something, it makes that even more real and a little more tangible because it’s that close. You can feel it a little bit more.

Jo Reed: Not only are you the only woman on stage, you’re also the only African-American on stage.

Dria Brown: Yeah.

Jo Reed: And you’re the first-- is that right? You’re the first African-American to do Bedlam’s—

Dria Brown: Saint Joan—

Jo Reed: —Saint Joan?

Dria Brown: Yes, I believe so. I think that is true. Someone asked me, they said how does it affect me? And I was saying it just feels like it’s right. It feels right. It does become kind of an everyman story and not about maybe some of the viewpoints that were stronger in Shaw’s time about Joan being French and that was the problem and then her dressing as a woman. But there are so many Joans now, so many—I’m calling this period like the rise of the matriarchy, and it is just about like the woman. And someone said something really interesting to me about how powerful it must be even in this day and age to see a young woman dressed in pants and chinos and riding boots and her hair pulled back and no makeup and still being very much like, “I am a woman. I’m choosing to dress as a soldier so that you respect me more, unfortunately, but I am still a woman. I’m not denying that.” And how many of these women in pantsuits we see every day around here, or Emma Gonzalez, again, from Parkland, of just these women who have had enough and who are on the forefront of everything, are on the forefront of a very great change. And I think being a woman of color just adds to it, adds to the pot of solidarity and of inclusiveness and just being able to see all of the things that my side of the story has to add to Saint Joan is very—it comes across in a really great way but not in a distracting way and it works.

Jo Reed: He wrote it in 1924, I think. I think you just addressed it very eloquently about why it’s still relevant, but it’s so interesting when you think about why some things stay relevant and other things just fall by the wayside. And it’s so hard, you know, to really work out, okay, why does that sound stilted but this does not?

Dria Brown: Right. Right. I think it’s because we’re in a time right now where a lot of people are not conforming to gender roles and they’re just kind of being, “I am who I am. I identify as myself or whatever I choose to identify as, and I feel called to do that because of a self-awareness,” whereas Joan had all of those feelings but felt very called to do it by God, by a higher power since she was 13. And just like how scandalous it was for a woman to dress like that back then is not something that’s far away. There are still churches who feel very strongly about where a woman’s place is or—our nation feels very strongly about what a woman should be, what a woman should look like, what a woman should present herself. And these are all the themes with politics and power mongering that are very present in today’s world, so it feels not far away, and that can be sad and empowering at the same time. There is a sadness about it, that we’re still not where we need to be but we’re working towards it, and that’s the pro of that. And what a better place to do Saint Joan in D.C. You just feel so-- when I heard it was in D.C., I was like, yes. People who are going to come see this play are right here in the epicenter of all that’s happening right now. So it feels very right for this time and for where we are.

Jo Reed: And after a good rest, I would imagine, what is next for you?

Dria Brown: I am auditioning right now. I would love to—I’ve been so fortunate to have been working since January, which is an actor’s dream of—you make all your New Year’s Resolutions as an actor and I’ve been booked from January to June, and I feel so, "Oh, I’m here. I’ve done it. I have insurance. I have all these great things. And so I’m auditioning and I’m also writing right now a pilot that’s really close to me, and I’m really excited to get done and share with the world. And hopefully I’ll be back here sometime, hint hint.

Dria Brown: That would be great, yeah.

Jo Reed: Well, Dria, thank you, really. I know it is an arduous performance, so I really do appreciate you giving me your time, and I thought it was a knockout of a performance.

Dria Brown: Oh, thank you so much.

Jo Reed: No, thank you.

That’s actor Dria Brown—she is playing the title role in Bedlam’s production of George Bernard Shaw’s St Joan—which is at the Folger theatre in D.C. until June 10. For more information go to folger.edu and click on events. You’ve been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. You can subscribe to Art Works where ever you get your podcasts—so please do and leave us a rating on Apple—it helps people to find us. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I'm Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.