The Odd Trio

By T.E. Kalem

MONDAY AFTER THE MIRACLE

by William Gibson

No play premiering at the Spoleto Festival U.S.A. in Charleston, S.C., has successfully made the transfer to Broadway. This one will. In Monday After the Miracle, William Gibson takes up the saga of Helen Keller and her teacher, Anne Sullivan, some 20 years after the events recorded in The Miracle Worker. In that play, Sullivan led the deaf and blind Keller in a long night's journey into light. The sequel is quite different. This is a tale of fiercely kindled passions and the bittersweet bondage of entwined destinies.

Helen (Karen Allen) is in her early 20s and studying for a degree at Radcliffe under the spartan tutelage and omnipresent care of Annie (Jane Alexander), who is now 37. Into this antiseptic den of discipline walks a former Harvard instructor of English, 25-year-old John Macy (William Converse-Roberts), who is applying for the job of editing some articles that will eventually grow into Helen's autobiography. An ardent socialist, John foists a couple of books by Karl Marx on Annie and, before five minutes go by, steals two highly subversive kisses. The haunting note of bliss and trouble in paradise is simultaneously sounded.

The courtship is prickly. At Annie's insistence, John must woo Helen for her consent before he can win Annie for his bride. At first, Helen fears that she will be forced to go back to her parents' home in Alabama and vegetate like "a cow." But between John's charms and Annie's assurances, Helen is won over. She gives her blessing and brings down the first-act curtain with the imperious "You must be married in this house."

And live in it too--that is the catch, at least for John. They become an odd trio a house of claustrophobia. John soon realizes that he is sharing a situation with his wife, not a life. Though she is desperate for a child, Annie's magnificent obsession and only priority is Helen. John takes to tippling. Tempers flare and caustic words are spoken, especially by Annie, who possesses, as she admits, "a mouthful of boils."

To Helen, the situation is deeply unsettling. She is very pretty (unlike the real Helen) and close to John in age. The nearness of a man in the house has been a spring awakening to her womanhood. So much so, that she and John are almost con-initiators of a seduction scene. When leaves for good, he seems like a strange interlude in both women's lives. In a final tableau, Annie and Helen stand on a darkening stage, their white ankle-length dresses wrapped around them like sails whipped by the wind, knowing that the only safe harbor lies in each other's heart.

Monday After the Miracle will be performed in many places with many casts, but it is doubtful if the miracle workers at Spoleto will be outperformed. Jane Alexander contains emotions like a dam, and as the tide of feeling rises and crests the dam breaks, the playgoer is flooded with her unleashed passion.

Karen Allen's Helen is a mountain brook washing over shining pebbles of self-discovery with a child's delight and limpid innocence. As for Converse-Roberts' John, he is a kind of D'Artagnan, fencing for his life, shielding his love against his love. Among them, Playwright Gibson, Director Arthur Penn and the entire cast ignite one of those blazing bonfires that keep serious dramatic theater inextinguishable.

--By T.E. Kalem

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