Word: childing
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...miracle of The Miracle Worker is that night after night, the militant kook from The Bronx and the tireless kid from Manhattan tenements re-create with consuming vitality the remarkable collaboration between blind child and half-blind adult that blossomed in Tuscumbia, Ala. three-quarters of a century ago. So successful are the two actresses that Author Gibson is convinced they transcend the bounds of mere acting. "I've always felt the curtain call was haunted," says Gibson. "A high percentage of the applause is for the people who really lived...
Unlocking a Mind. That haunting effect begins with the eerie, keening scream of the infant Helen Keller's mother (Patricia Neal) when she discovers that her child is deaf and blind. It is warmed by the first sound of the soft, self-assured brogue of Annie Sullivan arriving from Boston to take charge of Helen. It is nourished by the overwhelming urgency of Annie's every action, her passionate need to dispense with the amenities-and with the Keller family's sentimental softness-in order to get down to the awful business of unlocking a darkened human...
...Bancroft, as Annie Sullivan, comes onstage in her drab grey traveling suit and black, high-laced shoes. The stiff back, the solemn, measured steps are at once determined and shy. It is the hard-jawed fighter who meets her charge for the first time and all but devours the child with her eyes. It is the troubled stranger, caught suddenly between youthful belligerence and a growing awareness of responsibility, who catches a doll full in the mouth, spits a broken tooth into her cupped palm, agonizes over a job she may not be able to handle...
...flails into the heroic task of teaching wild young Helen the rudiments of table manners. Food and silverware explode across the room. Little Helen rushes to the door to pound out a plea for freedom. Annie promptly wrestles her back to her seat. Again and again and again, the child escapes and is captured. Again and again, Annie meets the near-demented girl on her own level, exchanging wild slaps and pokes. Still Helen breaks away, feinting her tormentor out of position, crawling under the table, perching on her chair with a kind of prim furor, and refusing...
...attended a workshop sponsored by Northwestern University and the American Foundation for the Blind; she practiced the manual alphabet at a camp for deaf-blind adults in Spring Valley, N.Y. And she suffered through her experience as a blind girl on a roller coaster. Finally she met the child who would become her partner in one of the finest performances of a theatrical generation-Patty Duke...