Renaissance Players present “The Miracle Worker” March 19-April 3

Release Date: 2/13/2004. Expired: 4/3/2004

The inspiring story of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan, the teacher who opened the world to a blind and deaf child, comes to the stage of The Renaissance Center when the Renaissance Players present a community theatre production of The Miracle Worker March 19-April 3.

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 six-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.

Sullivan had grown up in a government poorhouse after her mother died and her father abandoned the family. By age five she had lost most of her sight but two operations at the Perkins Institute restored enough vision that she could read normal print books for short periods of time. After leaving the institute, Sullivan found it difficult to find work due to her poor eyesight and jumped at the offer to work with Helen in 1887, even though she had no teaching experience.

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.

Of that moment, Keller would later describe the opening of a whole new world.

“As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten, a thrill of returning thought, and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me.”

With Sullivan by her side constantly, Keller graduated cum laude from Radcliffe in 1904 and went on to write 12 books, including her autobiography, numerous articles and to lecture 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.

The Miracle Worker was first presented as a live television play in 1957 on Playhouse 90 with Teresa Wright as Sullivan and Patty McCormack as Keller. Gibson wrote the script for a full stage production and sent a Braille version to the 79-year-old Keller. After some minor rewrites, The Miracle Worker debuted on Broadway in the Playhouse Theatre in 1959 with Anne Bancroft as Sullivan, 12-year-old Patty Duke as Keller and Patricia Neal as her mother, Kate. The play won four Tony Awards, including Best Play, Best Actress for Bancroft and Best Director for Arthur Penn.

The 1962 film version won two Oscars, Best Actress for Bancroft and Best Supporting Actress for Duke. In a 1979 television movie of The Miracle Worker, Melissa Gilbert played Keller and Duke played Sullivan, receiving the Emmy Award for Best Actress.

“The Miracle Worker is a true and touching story of human triumph,” said Hunt.

The Renaissance Players present The Miracle Worker in the Performance Hall of The Renaissance Center March 19-April 3. For more information, call (615)740-5600. To purchase tickets, call the box office at (615)740-5570.

The Renaissance Center is an arts and technology education and performing arts center at 855 Highway 46 South in Dickson, just 35 miles west of Nashville on Interstate 40 at exit 172.

Visit the Theatre page for more about community and professional theatre.

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