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NEW YORK — The battle to illuminate the mind and heart of Helen Keller remains as compelling as ever, even if the first Broadway revival of William Gibson's "The Miracle Worker" suffers from inhospitable surroundings and a supporting cast forced to bellow its way through much of the dialogue.
This fierce, one-on-one confrontation always has had a potent theatrically. Even in a less-than-ideal setting (the in-the-round Circle in the Square Theatre), the struggle by the formidable teacher Annie Sullivan to educate this deaf and blind child exerts an undeniable fascination.
The tussle has been heightened by the two actresses at center stage. Abigail Breslin, in her Broadway debut, makes an animalistic, frightening Helen, flailing in a darkness that disrupts a genteel, middle-class household in late 19th-century Alabama.
Breslin appears older than the petite Patty Duke, who played Helen in both the original 1959 stage production and repeated her performance in the film version three years later. Yet the star of "Little Miss Sunshine" is no less affecting.
And a lovely Alison Pill, sporting curly red locks, displays a crisp assurance, a no-nonsense practicality as Annie, the young woman who wants, in her words, to teach Helen "what language is ... words can be her eyes, to everything in the world outside her, and inside too, what is she without words? With them she can think, have ideas, be reached, there's not a thought or fact in the world that can't be hers."
It's that mission which is the most satisfying part of this production. But what surrounds the tumultuous teacher-student relationship has faded in the more than 50 years since Gibson's drama first opened in New York and won the Tony Award for best play.
Several of the other characters are serviceable at best, particularly Helen's cantankerous father (Matthew Modine) and her belligerent half brother (Tobias Segal). The two actors tend to shout their lines, making roles that already are sketchy, even more one-dimensional.
Jennifer Morrison comes off better as Helen's well-intentioned mother, a loving woman whose generosity toward her daughter actually hampers the child's development. Annie's idea of "tough love" is an intriguing aspect of the play that director Kate Whoriskey makes strikingly clear.
But Whoriskey, recently appointed artistic director at Seattle's Intiman Theatre, has her problems with the elongated playing area, which tends to swallow certain scenes as well as make for extended entrances and exits.
Derek McLane's designs for the Keller dining room rise up and down during the proceedings, hovering ominously overhead for much of the action.
Facial expressions mean a lot in "The Miracle Worker," and depending on where you are sitting at Circle in the Square, you will miss some of them. That's particularly true of the play's final moments, the celebrated "water" scene where Helen grasps the idea of language for the first time.
It's one of those surefire, emotional moments that never fails to move an audience. But the sniffles will be most pronounced in the area where theatergoers can see the wondrous look on Breslin's face.
