April 3: ‘The Miracle Worker’ at Renaissance Center
Directed by Ryan Hunt of the Renaissance Repertory Theatre Company, “The Miracle Worker” will be presented at 7 p.m. March 19-20, 26-27 and April 2-3 and at 2 p.m. March 20, 27 and April 3. Tickets are $12 for adults, $10 for seniors and $7 for children 12 and under.
“The Miracle Worker” has been a Tony Award-winning play (1959), Academy Award-winning movie (1962) and Emmy Award-winning television movie (1979). The play was written in the 1950s by William Gibson after he found a book about Sullivan’s letters detailing her experiences teaching a young deaf and blind child in Alabama in the late 1800s.
“The story of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan is an inspiring tale of perseverance, of triumph over adversity and of the bond that forms when a determined teacher refuses to give up on what most people at the time believed to be a hopeless child,” said Hunt, who is making his directorial debut at The Renaissance Center. “This is a beautiful work that allows us to see and feel how this woman worked to open up the world to a child.”
Born in Tuscumbia, Ala., Helen Adams Keller was struck by a mysterious illness at 19 months old in 1882. Doctors at the time called it a “brain fever,” which authorities today believe could have been either scarlet fever or meningitis. Although she survived the disease, her parents soon discovered the child had been left completely blind and deaf.
Despite the urgings of friends and family that Helen be sent to an institution, her mother, Kate, took 6-year-old Helen to a doctor in Baltimore who referred the family to Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, who was then devoted to working with the deaf. Bell referred the Kellers to the Perkins Institute for the Blind in Boston, which dispatched 20-year-old Anne Sullivan to Alabama to be Helen’s tutor.
Gibson’s play tells the story of Sullivan’s struggles to break through to Helen, who had been labeled a “wild child” and was prone to temper tantrums and fits. After just more than a month of fighting not only with Helen but also dealing with opposition to her teaching methods from Helen’s family, Sullivan finally realized the breakthrough she had sought when Helen understood that the hand symbols being made in her palm represented the water she was feeling from the family well.
With Sullivan by her side constantly, Keller graduated cum laude from Radcliffe in 1904 and went on to write 12 books, including her autobiography, and numerous articles, and lectured around the world on the plight of the visually and hearing impaired.
Sullivan died in 1936. After suffering the first of a series of strokes in 1961, Keller retired from public life. Several organizations and agencies devoted to assisting the blind and deaf operate under her name around the world. She died in 1968.