Miracle Worker Review: Accessible, Engaging, Endangered

To judge whether there is an audience for “The Miracle Worker” the first-ever Broadway revival of the 1959 play about the awakening of Helen Keller, let’s look at the numbers: as many as a million adults in the United States who are both deaf and blind; 20 million or so who are hearing-impaired; more than 25 million who are vision-impaired (people who have trouble seeing even with glasses); more than 300 million who experience frustration, yearn for connection, feel inspired by a true story of triumph over challenges.

Those challenges belonged both to Helen Keller, who at 19 months old was felled by a disease that made her both deaf and blind, and to Anne Sullivan, a young woman who had herself been blind until her sight was partially restored after nine surgeries, and had grown up in an orphanage. Anne Sullivan was hired to be Helen Keller’s teacher.

“Here’s a houseful of grownups can’t cope with the child,” exclaims Helen’s father, when 20-year-old Anne Sullivan first arrives at the Keller’s Alabama home. “How can an inexperienced half-blind Yankee schoolgirl manage her?”

The answer to that question is the focus of William Gibson’s play. The original Broadway production won four Tony Awards, including best play and best actress (Anne Bancroft; she and Patty Duke won Academy Awards for a reprisal of their roles in the 1962 movie adaptation). The play ran for nearly two years.

A few days after the opening of this second production, the producer announced that he was thinking of closing the show unless ticket sales picked up.

That would be a shock, and a shame. As directed by Kate Whoriskey, who was universally praised for her direction of “Ruined,” Lynn Nottage’s play examining the way civilians adjust to the terror of war in the Congo, “The Miracle Worker” presents its own kind of war, literal physical combat between two extraordinary young actresses, embodying characters who are very much fighting their personal terrors. Abigail Breslin, nominated for an Academy Award for her role as an unlikely beauty contestant in “Little Miss Sunshine” at the age of 10, is a wordless Helen — staring into space, disheveled, defiant, ever-eager to reach beyond her grasp — who uses her face and body with compelling clarity to reveal the world of a trapped intelligence. Alison Pill plays the young, stubborn working-class Anne determined to connect Helen to the rest of humanity, through language. Theatergoers may not recognize Pill as the same 23-year-old actress who was the lesbian activist campaign manager in the movie “Milk,” the cancer patient in denial in the HBO TV series “In Treatment,” the put-upon stamp collector’s daughter in “Mauritius” and the infatuated teenage terrorist in “The Lieutenant of Inishmore.” To remember her in those roles is to understand how completely she has transformed herself here into a young woman who feels in her own way as much a misfit from the world as her pupil.

The main objection to “The Miracle Worker” (besides just the fact that it’s a play rather than a musical) seems to be its staging in the round at Circle in The Square, which requires pieces of furniture attached by cords that rise and fall from the ceiling when needed, and which occasionally obstructs the viewing, depending on where in the theater you are sitting.

None of this bothered me. Maybe I had a good seat, or maybe what mattered most were the accumulation of moments in Anne’s battle to teach Helen, first the manners of civilized society, then (through finger-spelling) its language:

I liked this sense of scenes floating in space, the large empty stage seeming almost ethereal, a stand-in for the larger unknown world as it is experienced both by Helen because of her physical limitations and Anne because of her isolated upbringing.

The unorthodox staging would not bother the blind members of the audience either. They can take advantage of D-Scriptive audio description system available for free. For the hearing-impaired, there is both the Assistive Listening System available in other Broadway theaters, and something called I-Caption, a hand-held captioning system. There is also ShowTrans, which translates the proceedings (not just the dialogue) into Spanish, Portuguese or Japanese. Certain performances are interpreted in sign language or presented with open captions (the theater equivalent of film’s subtitles).

The next open-captioned performance, according to the Miracle Worker Web site, is Tuesday, March 23 at 7pm. The next sign-interpreted performance is Tuesday, March 30 at 7pm.

There is no other show on Broadway that is so accessible, to both the disabled and the young, and that speaks to them so directly.

Helen Keller, born in the 19th century, went on to become an internationally renowned figure of the 20th, author of 12 books, inspiring public speaker, political activist. After graduating from Radcliffe College – the first blind-deaf student to graduate from any college – this daughter of a former officer of the Confederate Army became a leading suffragette, anti-war activist, a socialist, advocate of birth control, one of the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union, and a disability rights activist. She was even credited with having introduced the Akita breed of dog to the United States. Maybe the time is right for a new drama about the adult Helen Keller? For the moment, there is, for the first time on Broadway in 50 years, “The Miracle Worker.”

March 28th Update: The producers have announced “The Miracle Worker” will close on April 4th.

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The Miracle Worker
At Circle in the Square Theater (235 West 50th Street)
By William Gibson; directed by Kate Whoriskey; sets by Derek McLane; costumes by Paul Tazewell; lighting by Kenneth Posner; music and sound by Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen; hair design by Charles LaPointe; physical coaching and movement by Lee Sher;
Cast:
Abigail Breslin (Helen Keller), Alison Pill (Annie Sullivan), Jennifer Morrison (Kate Keller), Elizabeth Franz (Aunt Ev), Matthew Modine (Captain Keller), Tobias Segal (James), Daniel Oreskes (Doctor/Anagnos), Michael Cummings (Percy), Simone Joy Jones (Martha), Yvette Ganier (Viney) and Lance Chantiles-Wertz (Jimmie).
Running time: 2 hours with one intermission.
Ticket prices: Normal: $80 to $117. Day of performance ticket lottery: $26.00. Premium seats: up to $202.