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The miracle that 20-year-old Annie Sullivan imparted upon a “knowledge-starved deaf and blind girl named Helen Keller” was the gift of language, said Ben Brantley in The New York Times. How ironic, then, that William Gibson’s melodramatic tearjerker is so hard on the ears. Chock full of “inspirational speeches and invocations,” the 1959 script sounds downright hokey today, and this “sadly pedestrian” revival—the first production on Broadway in almost 50 years—does it no favors. Director Kate Whoriskey appears to have instructed the cast “to speak loudly and in italics, as if the audience itself might be hearing-impaired.” The best scenes between Annie and Helen are the wordless ones.
Thankfully, such moments retain their potency here, said David Rooney in Variety. In her theatrical debut, 13-year-old Abigail Breslin conveys Helen’s “instinctive intelligence” and scheming rebelliousness without uttering a word. Alison Pill proves a “hard-edged, matter-of-fact” foil as Annie. We come to know Helen as Annie does, from their first encounter—in which she introduces the hand-signed alphabet that will “open her world to knowledge”—to the climactic brawl through which she finally installs discipline in her willful charge. And when Helen’s face lights up in recognition of the word “W-A-T-E-R,” the moment turns on the waterworks for the audience as well.
The play gains its momentum from key scenes such as these, said Elisabeth Vincentelli in the New York Post. Yet the theater-in-the-round staging—presumably meant to heighten the intimacy—in fact has a deadening effect. The stage is set in such a manner that the actors’ faces are often obscured. Pill and Breslin do their best, but there’s “only so much you can express with the back of your head.” Above all, The Miracle Worker requires physicality from its performers, since Helen communicates entirely through touch. Whoriskey “tones down this potentially unsettling intensity” to the point that even the fight scenes seem stiff and underwhelming. It’s too bad—this story about the “importance of communication” could have expressed so much more.
