The Miracle Worker questions

has anyone here ever done this show? how young was your Helen? how was the big dining room scene with Annie & Helen handled? i'd love to stage this show at my local theater (and have a girl who'd make a lovely Helen), but i'm very concerned about the physical nature of this scene...if i'm not wrong, there's lots of hitting---Annie beats the sh*t out of Helen to get her to eat with a fork & fold that friggin napkin. how can a child (who's supposed to be no more than 10, right) take all of that in rehearsals & performances nightly?

any comments from those of you who've done it?

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I did this show a few years ago in high school. Our Helen and Annie were both seniors, but the Helen was very young looking so they looked relatively age-appropriate. During the dining room scene, they really went at it. They did stage slaps during rehearsals but actually slapped eachother in performances. When Annie throws water on her, that was also marked in rehearsals. But most of it was Helen trying to run away, banging on the procenium and Annie pulling her back to the table. Hope that helps!

I read this play during my freshman year of high school. I appreciated it then, before I became obsessed with all things theater. It really is a great play.

You might want to choreograph the scene first and then add the lines. Stage it and have them say anything they want just for the moment.

The scene is a lulu, but is not the whole play.

It will be harder to isolate Helen emotionally by lack of sight, sound and speech than it will be to stage a giant contest of wills. The hitting is incidental. It is one of Helen's ways of communicating.

Get your Annie Sullivan to learn an ASL alphabet. There's lots of method homework here. The play is deceptively difficult from a technical point of view.

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Hey Will-- did this show in a Dinner Theatre 20 years ago. Helen was about 12- a real pro though.

We worked long & hard on the fight scenes and found that while there was the temptation to do a lot of slaps & hitting-- what read best was to use the props- a lot of throwing things, a lot of slamming into the table-- and not so much punching & hitting. A choreographer would be nice, but we didn't have money for that kind of thing. I can't remember what we used for plates- I recall shopping for china that could be broken at each show, but I think we settled on some REALLY heavy stoneware that was all but unbreakable. It sounded better when it hit the table or stage.

The big issue we had was cleaning up afterward-- we had no curtain and an arena style stage in VERY close quarters. And they made an AWFUL mess no matter what "Food" we used (Corn muffins and Rice w/food color as I recall). We solved it by having the actresses playing the maids come out and clean up in character as a scene was played in a small area off the main stage.