Word: blindingly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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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...
...Window. Patty's preparation was almost as painstaking as Anne's. Her agent and his wife taught her what it means to be blind by making her navigate with eyes shut around obstacles set up in their apartment; they made her practice deafness by teaching her to ignore telephone bells, suddenly clashed pot covers, unexpectedly fired questions. Conditioned reflexes to sight and sound came under control. The cast still remembers with amazement the night at Manhattan's Playhouse theater when a cable snapped with a loud crack high over the stage. Anne and the spaniel that plays...
...prepare for Miracle Worker, Anne worked at the Institute for Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation in Manhattan; she 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...
...belligerence that suggests she intends to remain just that. But she strives mightily to make herself over, with psychiatry, acting lessons, voice lessons (she hopes to do a musical next). Twice a week she still goes to Manhattan's Institute for Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation to work with blind disturbed children. It seems almost by design that she has little time left for dates, except for her platonic friendship with the Three Bears-the fatherly trio of Penn, Coe and Gibson-and with a couple of boys from the Actors' Studio...
...Miracle Worker. Remarkably acted by Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke, William Gibson's fairly makeshift story of Teacher Annie Sullivan's turbulent grappling with the deaf, blind, mute child, Helen Keller, most of the time emerges an unsentimental human document and memorable theater...