Meg Roe goes minimalist with The Miracle Worker— about blind and deaf child Helen Keller—while trying to keep emotions true.

David Cooper

Meg Roe promises to strip The Miracle Worker down to its beautiful bones. The production that Roe is directing runs at the Playhouse from tonight (October 15) to October 31, but William Gibson’s script started life in 1957 on television’s dramatic anthology Playhouse 90. Fifty years ago, in 1959, Gibson’s stage adaptation hit Broadway, starring Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke, who reprised their roles in the 1962 movie.

Because of its roots in TV, the play’s structure is remarkably fluid; events and locations overlap in an almost dreamlike way. And because the script deals with the triumph of Annie Sullivan, the teacher who broke the isolation suffered by deaf and blind child Helen Keller, the story is undeniably moving. But the text is also the product of another era and runs the risk of appearing sentimental and stagy to today’s audiences.

“It’s a really great story and it’s got a really great payoff,” Roe tells the Straight, sitting in the boardroom of the Playhouse production centre on East 2nd Avenue. The director, who won acclaim for her 2008 staging of The Tempest at Bard on the Beach, remembers when the Playhouse approached her about the project. “I thought, ‘There’s got to be a way that we can be creative with this and just shake it up—without losing the essence of what it is.’”

For starters, Roe and set designer Allan Stitchbury have been working on a minimalist look. In his stage directions, Gibson says, “The less set there is, the better.” But, as Roe points out, “There was really quite a lot of set in the original—platforms and staircases.” Roe and Stitchbury will use a single level that employs a revolve but very few set pieces. “For Helen, nothing exists unless she touches it,” Roe explains. “So, unless someone is actually sitting in it, or using it, or eating it, we don’t have it.”

Physical minimalism throws open the doors to the world of sound. “I feel like sound is the heartbeat of the show,” Roe reveals. Her partner Alessandro Juliani is designing the sound and writing original music. “I just inherited a pump organ that’s been part of my family for a really long time,” Roe says. “You have to make it breathe to make it sing, so I said to A. J., ‘Maybe you should use that as a starting point,’ and that became the keystone for the music.”

Roe and Juliani have turned some scenes into voice-over memories, and Roe has cut some smaller roles, including that of the Kellers’ pet setter Belle. “I felt like they were leftovers from the Broadway-ness of the original production—the dog and the extra blind girls, and the extra kids,” Roe explains. “It’s kind of icing on icing on icing.”

Although she acknowledges that the play’s sentimentality is a potential pitfall, the director wants audience members to experience the cleansing catharsis this tale can provide. “We just keep examining every scene and looking for the most authentic emotional ride,” Roe says. And she insists she’ll stay true to the heart of the piece.

“I think it’s about finding yourself defined by all of these things that are put on you: your childhood, your disabilities, your relationship with your kid, your marriage. Sometimes you get trapped in these definitions. But every so often you meet somebody who cracks open that prison and reinvents you, and suddenly you’re able to see and hear and speak.…I just really love the idea that, if you keep your eye out on the horizon for people who are really going to see you, you will also see people. And that’s a great gift.”