CHARLESTON, S.C. - In "Monday After the Miracle" Helen Keller - purblind but
capable of garbled speech - desperately yearns for romance while her teacher,
Annie Sullivan, escapes her own spinsterhood by marrying John Albert Macy, an
ardent suitor ll years her junior, and three years older than Helen. William
Gibson's play doggedly follows Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan approximately l0
years after "The Miracle Worker," which was something of a theatrical miracle
in l960. "Monday" is far less compelling, focused yet curiously off-center and
- in one of its central roles - badly performed. Like Helen spelling words into
a "listening" palm, Gibson's sequel is touch and go drama.
The action of the play, which is set in Cambridge, then Wrentham, begins in
l902 and covers about l0 years. Although the details are accurate, there aren't
many specific facts. For example, the program only specifies the play's time as
"the early part of this century," and we're given the ages of the principals
through casual remarks. What Gibson intends is to thread a theme through the
real lives of Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan and John Macy that will tell us
something about suffering and determination, dignity and survival that will
unite us all. Behind the historical presences, we're meant to see glimmers of
ourselves grasping for the elusive company of love. But, this time out, there's
something in Gibson's writing that keeps "Monday" at almost clinical distance.
We're merely watching "Hellen Keller Faces Life, Part II" (with intimations of
Part III to come). Interesting as some of it is, it's a passive, basically
non-dramatic experience.
The writing is a set-up, I mean so calculatedly that it calls attention to
Gibson's wavering craftsmanship. In the awkward opening scene Annie Sullivan is
hanging out the wash when she's accosted by a Trotskyite salesman, a brash,
dapper "talker," a politician as would-be lover. Interrupting the pinning of
chemises on the clothesline, John Macy leans over Annie Sullivan and gives her
a long passionate kiss, and without any resistance from Annie Sullivan at all.
What are we to make of this? Are Annie and John really strangers, or have they
met? If Gibson merely means to characterize Annie Sullivan's spinsterial
condition, the scene is blatant and forced. It's a musical comedy opening, the
Lusty Washerwoman ready to drop the laundry for the paperboy, the plumber, the
milkman, with kisses for all. In this first meeting not one moment is credible.
The play gets better as it proceeds, but with similarly awkward scenes.
When Helen Keller stumbles upon her teacher's involvement with John, which
Annie Sullivan lies about, she spirals into terror, a terror made up of
jealousy, envy, threat, hurt, fear. Helen cannot live without Annie, her
surrogate mother, her mentor, her finger-spelling companion in a world of
darkness and silence. The possibility of losing her to someone else swells into
paranoia. Meanwhile, Annie whose earlier life has been almost as a mean and
deprived as Helen's, wants sexual fulfillment, wants to have a child. She and
John gradually quiet Helen's fears when they tell her the three of them will
live together. They do, in Wrentham. And, one night some years later, John
comes close to seducing Helen, a scene of emotional complicity which leaves her
broken with guilt.
John Macy finally is shut out from Annie's and Helen's life. A writer -
published in, among other places, The Atlantic - he becomes a drunk. Helen, now
graduated from Radcliffe, has become celebrated on the lecture circuit, drawing
$l000 fees which support the Wrentham household. John goes down to defeat.
Annie, long childless, now womb-less, and Helen, still quivering for romance,
remain indissoluble. There's a bleakly fascinating coda about John. Divorced
from Annie Sullivan, he remarries and has a child. His second wife is a deaf
mute.
As real-life dramatic as Gibson's material is, it has been oddly flattened
by the scattershot effect of his scenes. While the story is basically
chronological, nothing seems to happen without Gibson prodding it into
melodramatic shape. We're not only aware of the carpentry, we're aware of the
nails and the hammering. Further, because the characters have identities beyond
Gibson's use of them, the identities stimulate a nagging thought that
eventually proves destructive to their on-stage credibility. I kept wondering:
did it really happen this way, were the menage a trois battles so close to
Albee-ian high drama? "The Miracle Worker" was all of a piece. The image I had
was that Gibson merely set the play in motion, and the play took over. But
here, in "Monday," the effort is labored, self-conscious. Necessary information
is delivered by two characters named Pete and Ed, who are little more than
desperate devices, the Greek chorus in New England. There are occasional
grandly noble lines: "The pain we feel is usable"; occasional overworked
balances: John says, "I can't father a child, let alone an adult book"; Annie
says to John, "Will you love me as I am, if I change enough?"
Under the direction of Arthur Penn, Karen Allen is wonderful as Helen
Keller. She speaks in struggling voice, the words seeming to hit her palate,
then suffer through a kind of nasal coherence. It's a close approximation of
the squashed, wounded voice of someone who has no hearing to give the hard-
earned words further shape. Karen Allen sometimes sounds like an arhythmic
French actress trying to speaking English, but it's a workable speech pattern
for Helen Keller. William Converse-Roberts is fine, too, as John Macy, at first
eager and winning, at last lost, despairing, pitiable. Jane Alexander is flatly
awful as Annie Sullivan, a performance - like the Hedda she did with the
Hartman Theater Company - of one-note insistence. Here the note is nagging
despotism, and scant echo of anything else. She snaps out the lines like a
secretary in a Welfare Department, barely varying an emotion, and ending far
removed from both Annie Sullivan and Anne Bancroft.
John Lee Beatty's set is an open deck, raftered house stucture, and
suitable. The costumes by Carol Oditz are fine.
Is there to be "Helen Keller, III?" Seems likely. Annie Sullivan died in
l936, and Helen Keller lived until l968. Near the end of "Monday After the
Miracle" - with John Macy long gone - Jane Alexander says, "Another half begins
now, without certain things . . ." Is "Tuesday After the Trio" in the works?
Copyright © 1982 Globe Newspaper Company