ATM Education · Study Guide
Even Unto Death Study Guide
After Joan of Arc’s execution, the people she left behind carry grief, memory, faith—and the work of speaking truth.
A new play by Jeanmarie Simpson
Begin the guide
At a Glance
A family story shaped by Joan of Arc’s absence.
A world of breath, bread, memory, testimony, and silence.
What does it mean to speak for the dead when institutions try to erase them?
Created for audiences, students, educators, and community groups.
About the Work
Even Unto Death is a historical drama by Jeanmarie Simpson that begins not with Joan of Arc’s victories, but with her absence. The play opens the day after Joan’s execution and stays with the people who must continue living in the space she once occupied: her mother, her father, her brothers, and the women who worked beside her.
Rather than presenting Joan as a distant icon or mythic figure, the play reconstructs her through memory, testimony, grief, and daily labor. Each character carries a different version of her: a daughter, a sister, a worker, a voice, a disruption, a holy witness, a beloved child.
This is a play about what remains after violence: memory, labor, love, testimony, and the refusal to let institutions decide the final meaning of a life.
Big Ideas to Listen For
Who owns a story?
Do institutions, courts, and religious authorities have the power to define a person—or does that power belong to those who knew, loved, and remember them?
What survives violence?
Joan is executed, but she is not erased. Memory, language, ritual, grief, and witness continue.
What is the cost of silence?
Some characters remain quiet from fear, habit, grief, or powerlessness. What does silence protect—and what does it destroy?
What does justice look like?
Justice is slow and incomplete. It depends on people who refuse to forget, even when speaking cannot undo the harm.
Historical & Dramatic Context
France in the early fifteenth century was torn apart by the Hundred Years’ War. The English claimed the crown of France, the Burgundians aligned with them, and Charles VII remained politically fragile. Into that instability stepped a peasant girl from Domrémy who said saints had commanded her to help drive out the English and bring the Dauphin to Reims for his coronation.
Capture and trial
Joan was captured at Compiègne in 1430, sold to the English, and delivered to Church courts in Rouen. Her judges were aligned with English political interests and determined to destroy her authority.
Condemnation
Because she was not noble, Joan was not tried for treason. Instead, she was charged with heresy, witchcraft, and wearing men’s clothes. Denied a fair process, she was burned on May 30, 1431. She was nineteen.
The play’s question
The play does not dramatize Joan on the battlefield. It asks what happened in the kitchen after the fire—and how truth can be restored when powerful institutions have lied.
Why this play matters now
The play confronts how institutions can shame victims, distort truth, and protect power while ordinary people are left to carry grief and speak what others refuse to name.
Why domestic labor matters
Bread, mending, sweeping, prayer, fire, and table-setting become acts of endurance, witness, and moral memory.
“The woman who bore her asked not for sainthood. Only Truth.”
Synopsis
Open the full story
The play opens in Domrémy on May 31, 1431, the day after Joan’s execution. Isabelle kneads bread. Margot stirs a pot. Jacques sits in silence. The coals are low. The world has not stopped, but everything inside the house has changed. A messenger brings word from Rouen: Joan has been burned. Isabelle tries to pray while continuing the work of the kitchen, but grief enters every task.
As days pass, Agnes brings more information from outside: Joan cried out for Christ, soldiers wept, and the bishop watched. Rumors and accusations spread. The play gradually reveals the violence of Joan’s treatment: coercion, humiliation, the manipulation of clothing, and the sexual threat surrounding her imprisonment.
At the same time, Margot’s own story emerges, connecting Joan’s persecution to broader patterns of violence against girls and women. The play refuses to isolate Joan as a single tragic exception.
Joan’s brothers Pierre and Jean return with guilt and grief of their own. They remember Jeannette not only as the Maid of Orléans, but as the girl who sang to hens, loved frogs, went barefoot in frost, and carried a shell in her pocket. Their memories are tender, broken, and incomplete. The family struggles not only with loss, but with the knowledge that they could not save her.
Time moves forward. Jacques dies at home, and Isabelle performs a final act of care for him when no priest is available. Years later, in Orléans, Isabelle lives in modest comfort, preserving relics of Jeannette’s childhood: a root, a doll’s head, a comb, a scapular, a shell, a scrap of linen.
When Agnes arrives with word that Joan’s name might yet be cleared, Isabelle chooses action. She travels to seek justice and publicly testifies as Joan’s mother. In the epilogue, we learn that her witness helped crack open the Church’s verdict, leading to the inquiry that cleared Joan’s name.
Key Characters
Isabelle Romée
Joan’s mother. Humble, precise, disciplined, grief-stricken, and ultimately fierce. Over the course of the play, Isabelle becomes witness, advocate, and public voice.
Agnes
A woman of the village, storyteller, herbess, gossip, and friend. Agnes brings news, history, urgency, and practical wisdom into the home, connecting private grief to the wider world.
Margot
A servant and survivor of profound violence. Quiet and watchful at first, she becomes a keeper of memory and a speaker of truths others would rather avoid.
Jacques d’Arc
Joan’s father. Hard, disciplined, ashamed, and emotionally constrained. He does not fully understand what has been taken until it is too late.
Pierre d’Arc
Joan’s older brother. Angry, impulsive, and burdened by guilt. He believes violence and action should have saved her and cannot forgive failure.
Jean d’Arc
Joan’s eldest brother. Quieter than Pierre and deeply haunted. His memories of seeing Joan in her final moments make him one of the play’s most painful witnesses.
Themes & Big Ideas
Memory as Resistance
Remembering is not passive. Speaking Joan’s name, preserving her objects, repeating her story, and refusing false narratives are acts of moral resistance.
Women’s Testimony & Moral Authority
Isabelle begins in the domestic sphere, but the play reveals that moral authority can emerge from places history often ignores. A mother’s testimony becomes more truthful than the words of those who judged her daughter.
Institutional Power & Manifest Injustice
Church courts, bishops, priests, and systems of judgment show how institutions can clothe violence in holy language, making cruelty seem lawful and fear seem righteous.
Domestic Labor as Sacred Labor
Kneading bread, stirring soup, laying a table, cleaning a basin, sewing a seam, and tending a fire become actions of dignity, endurance, and faith.
Gender, Shame & Violence
The script confronts the ways women and girls are blamed, shamed, punished, and disbelieved. Margot’s story connects Joan’s persecution to larger patterns of bodily and social violence.
Faith Without Simplicity
Faith includes anger, devotion, ritual, accusation, grief, tenderness, and endurance. The characters pray sincerely in a world where religious power has been used to justify injustice.
Vocabulary
A belief or practice that religious authorities declare false or dangerous.
In Joan’s trial, the accusation that she returned to condemned behavior, used to justify execution.
A ritual use of holy oil, often for blessing, healing, or preparing the dying.
A formal request made to an authority for action or correction.
The later Church inquiry that overturned Joan’s original conviction.
A public witness statement or account used as evidence.
An object preserved because it is associated with someone sacred, beloved, or historically important.
A person killed because of belief, witness, or refusal to abandon a cause.
Questions for Reflection
Before
- What is the difference between remembering someone and defending their name?
- Who usually shapes the official version of history?
- How can private grief become public action?
- What happens when institutions use moral language to justify harm?
- What courage is required to speak after violence is over?
During
- Notice how the kitchen becomes a place of labor, prayer, ritual, grief, and memory.
- Watch how kneading bread, folding cloth, and setting a table carry emotion.
- Listen for how each character describes Jeannette differently.
- Notice when silence protects, wounds, or changes.
- Listen for the relationship between personal grief and public truth.
- Notice the shift from domestic sorrow to public testimony.
After
- Why center Isabelle and the family rather than Joan herself?
- Which memory of Jeannette stayed with you most strongly?
- What does the play suggest about truth and power?
- How does Margot expand the play beyond one historical figure?
- Did the ending feel like justice, repair, witness, or something incomplete?
- What does the play ask audiences to remember differently about Joan?
Activities & Writing Prompts
Quick Reflection
Write for five minutes about one powerful object: bread dough, a stool, a scapular, a shell, a certificate, a bowl, a taper, a rag, or another item. Why did it matter?
Discussion Activity
Discuss: “It’s easier to damn a girl than the hands that lit the flame.” What does this reveal about blame, gender, and social power?
Creative Writing
Write a letter from Isabelle to Jeannette after the testimony in Paris. What would she want her daughter to know about memory, justice, grief, and what remains?
Performance Activity
Stage a short moment of domestic labor with full emotional intention but minimal dialogue. Explore how gesture, silence, pace, and sound communicate grief and endurance.
Research Extension
Research the difference between Joan’s 1431 condemnation and the later inquiry that cleared her name. Why does official correction matter, even when it comes too late?
Group Reflection
Identify one moment when silence carried as much meaning as speech. Why was it powerful? What did it reveal?
About Arizona Theatre Matters
Arizona Theatre Matters is a theatre company building universally accessible work from the ground up. Through performance, education, sound, history, and storytelling, the company creates thoughtful, engaging experiences that invite audiences into theatre in inclusive and imaginative ways.
This free guide was developed from the script of Even Unto Death to support meaningful reflection before and after audiences experience the production.