On Stage
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
On STAGE By Joseph T. Shipley The Awakening Of a Human Spirit The Miracle Worker. By William Gibson. Directed by Arthur Perm. Presented by Fred Coe. At the Playhouse. BROADWAY'S most vigorous...
...She strikes out at every obstacle...
...And in a glow of radiance animal is transformed into man...
...She throws down her spoon, starts to eat with her fingers and, when Annie interferes, spills the pitcher of water over her...
...But behind the story of Annie and Helen looms all humanity...
...My tear ducts, I suspect, have loosened with the years, but I noticed vounger critics rubbing knuckles on eyes...
...The battle of the two, through that dining room tantrum, is one of the wildest struggles of body and will on our stage...
...Annie drags her out to the pump...
...Its words are the body of a waking soul...
...She also learns 37 words in the sign language—but the signs have no significance...
...First must come discipline: the wild animal must be trained...
...Six-year-old Helen gropes her way in a world devoid of meaning...
...When Annie tries to put order into the child's eating, the resultant rampage wrecks the dining room...
...This...
...The story requires, and receives, flawless acting...
...For it recapitulates the earliest and hardest struggle of our species, the rise from blind sensation to the greater vision, not of the eyes but of the mind—the grasp of meaning, of symbols, upon which hangs all human growth...
...Tightly she clasps him...
...Anne Bancroft consummately captures the tartness of the Irish girl who transforms her pigheadedness into devotion...
...It is a tempestuous play, pitting flabby love against firm discipline, the easy yielding to pressure against the hard upward climb...
...and if we tough boys are thus moved, soon Broadway will be salt with audience tears...
...But how can she break through the beastlike darkness of this quick but chaotic spirit...
...But Helen puts on her napkin before she gets her food...
...Helen learns to eat properly and to stay clean...
...Father...
...the rest of the play is natural, and at times heart-rending...
...The servants, the parents, and the brother who finds his manhood as he watches Annie fight for Helen, are solid background to the two central characters...
...Annie is a pauper...
...Granted a fortnight in the back house alone with Helen, away from her indulgent parents, Annie continues the training...
...Little Patty Duke seems herself a minor miracle in her picture of the intelligent but handicapped child, seeking through darkness a meaning for her days, transfused with glory when she finds it...
...This vocalizing of her struggle we could have been spared...
...Helen must refill the pitcher...
...she has lost a brother in the filth, disease and neglect of an asylum...
...she messes herself in every way...
...This Irish Boston girl, in the distrustful if not hostile South, has to fight impatient and loving parents who have given in to their unmanageable child, and also her own sense of insufficiency and her Irish temper...
...When the Kellers insist that their child come home, Helen, with animal cunning, tries to regain her old freedom...
...Then this...
...At moments of discouragement she hears the voice of her brother, and the murmur of her conscience or daimon or guardian saint, voices that prick her on like another Joan of Arc...
...It is a positive play amid too many dramas of negation...
...Annie is despondent, for Helen is only at the level of the trained beast...
...She finds the Kellers wondering whether to send little Helen to such a place, and she determines to save the child from this hopeless end...
...she has attained obedience without understanding...
...Then 20-year-old Annie Sullivan, her own eyesight just restored, comes from Boston to teach the child, at the Keller home in Alabama...
...it will be a wonder if these two actresses can keep tumbling through it eight times a week for the coming years...
...Here, in a sudden flash—as the feel of the water plays upon her eager though rebellious spirit—understanding strikes: The child connects the symbol and the fact...
...she is only mimicking the master who gives her food...
...Unlike Sunrise at Campobello, which would have little force did we not know that the struggling cripple was to become President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, The Miracle Worker, even if "Helen Keller" were an unknown name, would touch us at the core of our being...
...One of my colleagues remarked: "Here is the 1960 Pulitzer surprize play...
...Mother...
...She talks with a crisp natural speech, and her manner varies subtly as she meets the varied situations, appealing to the love of the mother, managing the bossy father, snubbing the condescending brother, holding firm against the fierce rebellion of the child...
...The sudden flash of meaning in Helen was prepared by the long patience of Annie...
...Fervently Helen clutches her...
...BROADWAY'S most vigorous tear-jerker in 17 seasons brings a "miracle worker" to turn a blind, deaf and mute young animal named Helen Keller into a growing human...
...How reach to that mind with symbols that bring meaning, the human light...
...This movement of the fingers means water...
...Her loving but helpless parents permit her to do anything she wants...
...she is wholly untrained...
Vol. 42 • November 1959 • No. 41
