Dark/Silent – The Woman Play

Water breaks its banks and is Helen Keller's friend

summary - cast list - music - cyclepedia - script (pdf)

If the Unabomber retreats from a hostile world to a remote shack, Helen Keller makes the opposite journey. At first enclosed in her own mind by her inability to see, hear, or speak, she gradually enters the wider world, learning first the relation of words to things, then of alphabetic characters to words. Under the guidance of her teacher, Anne Sullivan, her consciousness expands, and she becomes increasingly independent. Ultimately her “ship of pearl…venturous bark” lands the intrepid Helen at Radcliffe/Harvard (ironically Ted’s alma mater as well).

But with knowledge comes discrimination. The great world is not perfect—a thread can break, tangle, or unwind--and as Anne’s own vision and health decline, Helen becomes aware not only of her own isolation, but of isolation as a quality inherent in human life. She reflects on the limitations of language, the fragility of thought and memory, in a bittersweet tone any devotee of Japanese culture will recognize. “Life is a pursuit of safety that invests you steadily in the ruin of your home until you become so used to ruined homes that in the end, well, there you are.”

synopsis by Edith Reisner Newton

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