Miracle Workers: Julie Harris and Patty Duke

The fearless yearning of the human soul!

That is what I’d like to talk about in this editorial.

Amidst the urgency of combating the Obama Nation’s disgusting ambitions for shrinking the United States of America into a docile and obedient fixture in the profoundly Marxist vision of a New World Order, I have recently rediscovered a veritably cinematic hymn to what drives the human soul.

Julie Harris “Member of the Wedding”

We humans harbor an insatiable desire to know the entire universe. That, at least, is what I’ve concluded while watching the incredibly powerful performances of Julie Harris in Member of the Wedding and Patty Duke in The Miracle Worker.

This experience, as an audience member, of Helen Keller’s ferocious journey from an animal ignorance to human enlightenment captures with blissfully overwhelming density the same feeling I had experienced with my first and now repeated viewings of the film, Member of the Wedding.

No two performances have ever … nor perhaps will ever … explode in my own soul with the essence of pure human yearning more completely than Julie Harris in Member of the Wedding and Patty Duke in The Miracle Worker.

Someone – I wish I could remember who – described great acting as “controlled abandon”. Both Ms. Harris and Ms. Duke, through the magic of their remarkable souls, seem to have abandoned all control.

There’s a paradise of freedom within their songs … and yes, they both sing their roles, one vocally and the other physically.

The two, one, the “Frankie” of Julie Harris, is a warm-up for the other, Patty Duke’s Helen.

I say warm-up because there is a rather harsh end to Frankie’s poetic abandon when she appears in the last scene in Member of the Wedding as little more than a spoiled, white brat.

Since Member of the Wedding began as what might have been an autobiographical poem delivered as a novel, it is hard to say who might have so politicized it as a stage drama.

There is, however, within the politics of the theater company surrounding the dramatized version, an extraordinarily portside list. The radically Left Group Theater’s Harold Clurman directed the stage version of Member of the Wedding. Though he certainly must have approved of the play’s harshly anti-American ending, I doubt, having known and worked with Mr. Clurman, that the casting and power of the performances would have been possible without Mr. Clurman.

I find the ending bitter and, I must conclude, ruthless, almost Brechtian. It is a sudden and ungenerously short demonization of almost all of the white characters in the play – except for Frankie’s younger cousin, John Henry West, perfectly portrayed by Brandon De Wilde.

Until Frankie’s unfortunate, run-away-from-home journey into town brands her with white folk lust and greed, as compared to the selflessness of her black nanny, also performed to perfection by Ethel Waters, the young, 12 year-old’s “controlled abandon” is … well … breathtaking.’

The fearless yearning of her soul?

A theme only recaptured, as I’ve suggested, by Patty Duke’s unrelentingly moving dance as the deaf and dumb Helen Keller.

It is in Ms. Duke’s spellbinding eyes that you first begin to sense just how profound is Helen’s Keller’s hunger to know.

Coupled with the fearless abandon of her body – the “ultimate fighting” level of her first major lesson with Annie Sullivan is, for me at any rate, the greatest fight scene in all of Hollywood film history – Patty Duke takes Julie Harris’ sacred voice as Frankie in Member of the Wedding and translates it into a ballet of profound need to know the universe around her.

The stages of Helen Keller’s education in The Miracle Worker are a cross between ballet and grand guignol.

Yes, sometimes you want to turn away from the screen, the violence and, more disturbingly, the violent feelings within both Ms. Keller/Duke and Ms. Sullivan/Bancroft are beyond palpable. You wince.

Once, however, Helen learns to eat properly … and following her relapse into, I must say, a sometimes thrilling animality … the quest for both Helen and Annie is to find some sacred agreement about what the bizarre finger signals mean!

What can those hand gymnastics being forced upon the apparently benighted Helen by Annie possibly achieve?

Patty Duke and Anne Bancroft in “The Miracle Worker”

Just recalling the … uh … epiphany – a very Joycean word indeed, appropriate for the Odyssey which the very Irish Ms. Sullivan must take her ward through –  merely remembering the moment when both the finger signals and the sound of the word “water” … or, as Annie must sound it, “Waaa-waaa!” … as they come together in full recognition?!

That “Miracle” we all take for granted, is revealed for the first time to young Helen Keller … and we, indeed, yes, the audience members, are most privileged to have fallen … or … no, to have been flown at top speed … into the divinity of what it is to be a human being.

If you have the time – or even if you don’t have the time – make the time!

Rent both Member of the Wedding and The Miracle Worker and see how the discoveries of Julie Harris in her examination of a 12 year-old Frankie have been mirrored by Patty Duke in The Miracle Worker; and, with a script not only devoid of Leftist posturing but a piece of sacred understanding for everyone involved, how the purist essence of Greek drama as a religious ritual is fulfilled in the most complete and profoundest sense.

It is not with anything but desperate gratitude that Annie Sullivan/Anne Bancroft makes the Sign of the Cross.

I make the same gesture now in gratitude for the miracles that are the miracle workers, Julie Harris and Patty Duke.