Viewed simply as a divertissement competing for attention with local movies and plays, Maxwell Anderson's "Joan of Lorraine," which last night began a week's stay at the Brattle Theater, is certainly worth a visit. To regard the current offering of the Cambridge Summer Theater otherwise, is to get involved in bootless speculation on whether Bergman wouldn't have quirked an eyebrow here, or whether Shaw didn't render the line more felicitously there.

The fact is that Anderson has managed to make his "Joan" a worthwhile evening's playgoing, though, characteristically, he has tacked, veered, and in places turned back on himself, in trying to achieve this end. His device is to present as the heroine an actress who finds herself becoming one with her role of "Joan," and reading into her offstage life some of Joan's ethical dilemmas. While this plot frame is not palpitatingly new, Anderson constructs within it some striking situations. We have here, then, a morality play, and just so you'll be sure to get his point, Anderson drives it home with gargantuan strokes of his ideological sledgehammer. Nothing political, of course: mainly a muddy discussion of ends, means, and ought-we-to-do-its that would scarcely tax the reflective powers of a Cambridge High junior. The point--that, like Joan, we may have to make small, bitter concessions in serving the greater concept--becomes clear to the heroine through a puzzling scene in which the deus ex machina descends with a thud to the stage.

Despite these debilities, the play is retrieved and made fit for viewing by several considerations. One is that it takes a lot of inept handling to obscure the dramatic facts of Joan's career. Another is Maxwell Anderson's amazing gift of producing a flow of facile, taut dialogue. Finally, the cast is enthusiastic and, in the main, knows its craft. Madge Evans, despite a vigorous between-acts clawing from the Bergman acolytes, is fluent, intent on what she's doing, and very good to look at: and Richard Crouch is quick, practical, and harried as a stage manager.

Those irreconcilables who can't abide the thought of anyone but Shaw, or Bergman, tampering with the character of Joan, will find possible solace at the Colonial, in viewing John Gielgud's "Love for Love.