The Miracle Worker
At the outset, let me say that I had trepidation about seeing a production of a play as classic as William Gibson’s The Miracle Worker. The movie version of the Broadway play, starring some members of the original stage cast, is incredible. Could a small company at a local theatre accomplish much more?
No fears-this production is worth seeing. Director Joel Daavid has accomplished the feat of staging this complex and literally exhausting play, keeping its pace brisk despite its more than two and a half hour running time. The emotional affect is powerful, cathartic, and can bring out tears in the eyes of the most cynical.
The story is probably familiar to all, but if you are not familiar with it-the Kellers are a genteel Southern family, living in rural Alabama in the 1880s. The father is a retired Civil War captain, married for the second time to a younger woman. The son, James (by the Captain’s first wife) is a twenty-something idler who doesn’t get along well with his father. The mother, Kate, is sensitive, over-protective, and has recently given birth to her second daughter, “the angel” of the family. It is the older daughter, Helen, who is the family’s obsession.
Born with all her senses, Helen lost both her sight and her hearing due to fever in infancy. Ten years later (her actual age at the time of this story was six, but the age was changed to accommodate the casting of an older child), she is a housebound feral child, given to tantrums and acts of violence, monopolizing the family’s attention at every turn.
When the Kellers can no longer bear the constant disruption of normal family life by their daughter’s actions, they contact the Perkins Institute for the Blind in Boston. They are sent a “governess” who will teach Helen communication-and obedience. This teacher is Anne Sullivan, age 20, a working-class daughter of Irish immigrants, a survivor of several years spent in a state almshouse that, from her description, makes the workhouses of Dickens sound like four-star hotels. She has also been blind herself, her sight restored by a series of nine operations.
Annie Sullivan fights a hard battle. She sees that the Kellers have spoiled their daughter and that she must teach Helen to behave in a civilized manner before she can teach her anything else. She also sees that the family’s over-protection of their “impaired” child, and the internecine tensions between the family members, is going to be an additional battle for her. The “miracle” here is not one single miracle, although the play’s climax delivers a breakthrough that sends shivers down the spine. It’s the smaller miracles that one notes: James’s breakthrough when he finally asserts himself, the parents’ gradual acceptance of Annie’s unorthodox methods, Helen’s evolution from crafty and wild to docile and intelligent.
The cast members execute their roles with skill, but the two standouts are Erin Christine Shaver as Annie and Carlie Nettles as Helen. Shaver embodies the role of Annie as if she had lived the woman’s life. Even when the character displays what seems like rude behavior, she retains her likeability. Nettles, who is making her stage debut with this play, is amazing. It is a jolt when she takes her curtain call and makes eye contact with the audience, for while playing Helen, she never seems to even blink. The most difficult aspect of her role, which she succeeds at admirably, is conveying simultaneously the inner darkness that Helen lives in and her “mind [that] works like a mousetrap.”
Julie Austin Felder also is outstanding as Kate Keller, maintaining a balance between soft-heartedness and underlying strength. Stuart W. Howard is fine as the Captain, resisting the temptation of letting the character become all bluster. Ethan Brosowsky has some strong moments as James, although he occasionally murmurs his lines.
Judy Pisarro-Grant, credited as “choreographer,” has crafted some interesting moments during Annie’s harrowing flashbacks to her almshouse past-a group of “blind girls” perform motions to illustrate the horrors of the asylum and Annie’s emotions. Pisarro-Grant and director Daavid’s staging of the infamous breakfast “fight scene” is as unrestrained as it needs to be-and one must congratulate the principals for living through it performance after performance.
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Theater: The Matrix Theatre Company, 7657 Melrose Avenue, Los Angeles
Web Site: http://www.matrixtheatre.com/
Tickets: 323.960.7863
Dates: Through March 15, 2009