New Plays on Broadway

The Miracle Worker (by William Gibson) tells the story of Teacher Annie Sullivan's clenched, turbulent, finally triumphant grappling with the child Helen Keller--a story that, however well known, acquires stunning new reality and affect-ingness on the stage. The overwhelming force of the play's crucial scenes could not have derived from the stirring facts alone, nor from Playwright Gibson's vivid use of them. What proves decisive is the extraordinary performances, the magnificent teamwork of Anne Bancroft and ten-year-old Patty Duke, and the brilliant direction of Arthur Penn.

The institution-bred young Boston Irish girl whose first job was as nurse and teacher to the deaf, blind, mute Helen Keller had herself known blindness as a child, along with squalor. Stubborn, hardheaded, wryly humorous, Annie comes upon an ungovernable small animal who, with useless ears and eyes, can only flail and thrash about with arms and legs. Pity, Annie tells the bewildered family who indulged the child, is all wrong. When, after a Homeric tussle, a kind of wild barbaric ballet, a literal knockdown-drag-out fight, Annie gets Helen to eat with a spoon and fold her napkin, Annie feels equally that obedience without understanding is not enough. The battle cannot be won until Helen, through her fingers, can signal her mind, can comprehend and communicate. Annie might have said, with E. M. Forster, "Only connect." The play ends with the vital connection made, when what for Helen has been a mere finger game becomes a living, expanding language.

The key to Annie Sullivan's method, and what in turn opened a locked-up mind, was her militantly unsentimental attitude. That attitude is a saving thing for The Miracle Worker as well as for Helen. It sets the play's tone, makes it only here and there a tearjerker and most of the time a human document, in which comedy and heroism jostle each other. "I go to bed with writer's cramp," Annie jokes, "from talking too much." Never, in one way or another, have those faithful taciturn servants of drama, pantomime and gesture, played more central or eloquent roles.

As a play that involves some knotty Keller family relationships and some eerie Sullivan family memories, The Miracle Worker is fairly makeshift, at times clumsy, and, when sound-tracking voices from the past, occasionally embarrassing. On the other hand, the uneven family scenes serve as a needed contrast, a necessary letdown, to the tense, brawling, fist-flying, water-throwing, plate-smashing, blind-rage struggles toward the light that, in the hands of two remarkable actresses, constitute unforgettable theater.

The Warm Peninsula (by Joe Masteroff) is Florida, where Julie Harris and June Havoc alternate their heartthrobs. First Julie, a plain girl who wears glasses and would like a man, chats cozily with the audience; then June comes on, an out-of-work nightclubber who would like a man she can like. Julie, who pays half the rent on June's Miami Beach apart ment without knowing that a married gent is paying all of it, soon falls madly in love with a personable painter (Farley Granger) who turns out to be a gigolo. June falls just as madly for a personable athlete (Larry Hagman) who turns out to be married. The girls take turns seeing their beaux, or sighing for them, or conducting little heart-to-heart talks with the audience.

As a sort of penny-plain and tuppence-colored combine of the wistful wallflower and the rueful tramp, The Warm Peninsula is something for the slightly retarded matinee trade. They can revel in the sight of two cups running o'er, one lightly spiced, one nice and sugary. They can manage to get on almost personal terms with two enjoyable actresses. June Havoc offers her always appealing downrightness. Julie Harris is deft and disarmingly winning, but for someone so gifted, she is sometimes dismayingly cute. The play itself is all of a piece, with no jangling false notes--there being no true ones to jangle against.

Flowering Cherry (by Robert Bolt) brings little variation to a familiar theme: the inept blusterer, the insecure braggart, under whose dead weight his whole household is genteelly sinking. English Playwright Bolt can write neatly enough about inflated nullity, can make characters recognizable in a somewhat dusty mirror, can suggest what life looks like through smoke-colored glasses. But along with the play's virtue that nothing seems grossly contrived or distorted goes the weakness that nothing really seems created or alive. There is none of the sudden bite, or comic lustiness, or tragic undertow with which, from Juno and the Paycock and The Show Off to A Touch of the Poet and The Entertainer, the fourflusher as family man has been portrayed. Flowering Cherry proves stubbornly unmoving.

Trying to make all this good grey realism better with some empurpled staging, Director Frith Banbury has only made it worse. As the husband, Eric Portman has sufficiently resisted emoting to give a good sound performance, but as the wife, Wendy Hiller has, in places, plainly succumbed. The result is to flyspeck the play's one real virtue, its honesty.

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