Schematic and only as rewarding as your sensibility allows, is Three
Days to See, an
impressionistic piece directed and
conceived by Transport Group artistic director Jack Cummings
III, who draws nearly all of its text from
the diaries of Hellen Keller. The evening is built for an ensemble of seven
performers—of varying ages, genders and ethnicities (objectively it would
seem less important what those are particularly than that there is
variance)—to move through Helen’s autobiographical life chronologically
(the story may move back and forth a little, but the diary excerpts are
chronological, and backlooking is her own retrospective POV). Due in part, one
would imagine, to Cummings’ experience directing musicals, he brings much to
the party in terms of movement, choreography and the use of music (most of
which references the era of the excerpt being presented at the given moment).
It
starts on a troubling note: a few cringeworthy minutes of Helen Keller party
jokes, you know the ones, that ignore her humanity and reduce her to
blind-and-deaf as a generic target, escalating in tastelessness and frantic
delivery until an explosion into genuine Keller language; and objectively, I
understand the strategy, a let’s-get-this-out-of-our-system purge for a
generation that only knows her as a mascot for the sense-impaired, so that when
we get into deep Helen, authentic Helen, cultural icon and devastatingly
perceptive commentator on her times Helen, we must come to grips with our own
limitations and face the irony; but it doesn’t work that way. Like the wrong
opening number (which essentially it is), it sets up a different show than the
one Cummings wants us to embrace. Much more effective is what is, in effect, a
second opening number, a pantomime—performed to the energetic strains of
Benny Goodman’s “Sing! Sing! Sing!”—in which Barbara Walsh plays Annie Sullivan, the teacher (and eventual
lifelong companion) who famously broke through the child Helen’s barriers, and
the other six trade off playing the child Helen, in a rapid fire montage of
scenes depicting the process leading up to that breakthrough.
What
makes this more effective, and a far better starting place, is that this is the
real set of Helen Keller clichés, for
what Cummings is tacitly doing, is blowing through the iconic scenes of William
Gibson’s play about this, The Miracle Worker. The beast need not be named formally, nor its rights
acquired, for the scenes are also historically true, but they’re the
pop-culture images we were weaned on via the feature film (and a subsequent TV
movie, in which the actress who once played Helen [Patty Duke] now plays Annie
Sullivan). And what this passage
does is get the familiar stuff overwith. And it does set up the
rest, because what it says is, there’s a whole life of Helen after this, a life
most of you don’t know.
It’s
a profound life to be sure, and the imaginative and symbolic configurations
through which Ms. Walsh and the others—Patrick Boll, Marc delaCruz, Thelma McCarthy, Chianza
Uche and Zoe Wilson—deliver the excerpts are engaging enough to
sustain a certain steady interest…but not, in the show’s current state, to make
Three Days to See compulsively riveting. Basically we’re making
measured progress through Helen’s timeline, and the text, on aggregate, is
really only that of an average-quality one-woman autobio-play, multifurcated
among an ensemble. That may be why it disappoints; because once the text begins
in earnest, it’s a very familiar structure, despite the avant garde delivery
system.
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