"The Miracle Worker"
William Gibson
Mt. Hood Repertory Theatre
July-August 2009
This was my first full production with Mt. Hood Rep's summer festival, though I had done a number of staged readings with the Rep's Readers Theatre in years past.
My role was Mr. Anagnos, the director of the Perkins School for the Blind in Massachusetts who sends off Annie Sullivan to her first and only job as a teacher to little Helen Keller in Alabama. The script calls for a Greek accent, and director Justin Lazenby agreed to my suggestion that Mr. Anagnos might look more authentic with a mustache and beard.
Since I was busy with "Lucky Jim's Fishing Show" well into May, and my part was a small one, I joined rehearsals for "The Miracle Worker" only a couple weeks before it opened. Kelly Lazenby, who played Annie, and the two girls who shared the role of Helen, Roxanne Stathos and Kallan Dana, had been working on their roles, particularly the lengthy fight scene at the breakfast table that would climax the first half, for many weeks before that.
Although my character appeared onstage for all of five minutes, early in a show that ran for more than two hours, I enjoyed watching that amazing fight scene over and over from the wings.
The two other males in the production were already acquaintances: Tim Jaeger I knew from the Speak-the-Speech recording of "A Winter's Tale" the year before, when we had worked on several scenes opposite each other as Polixenes and Camillo. We had since crossed trails in other audio work with the Willamette Radio Workshop.
This was my first full production with Philip M. Meyer, but I had sought him out and made his acquaintance the year before, following our separate work in Portland Actors Ensemble productions in the parks: "Julius Caesar" for me, "Two Gentlemen of Verona" for him.
An unforeseen reward of this production was that we shared a dressing room with the male actors in the second summer show put on by Mt. Hood Rep, "Bullshot Crummond." The workhorse of that production, who had to do multiple costume changes and employ more than a half dozen British dialects, was Sammuel Hawkins, whom I had first met during our long dressing room waits between scenes in "Arcadia," at Lakewood Theatre in early 2007. Randy Patterson I knew from a number of years back, though I didn't see as much of him this season, and I got to make the acquaintance of Jon Plueard, who was playing the title role.
One other memorable cast member was Onyx, a black labrador who was a guide dog for Erin Rumer, an actual blind member of the cast. The script calls for brief appearances by a dog several times in the show, and Onyx did a terrific job, for the most part, although he sometimes anticipated his exit in the first scene because he managed to eat his bone treat too fast. What really charmed the audience was his professional bow (a "downward dog," for yoga enthusiasts who know that one) on command from Erin during the Perkins School students' curtain call.