Photo by Lester Smith
In shadows on the stage’s back curtain, teacher Annie Sullivan and her difficult young student Helen Keller react to the finger-spelling breakthrough in dealing with Helen’s blind, deaf, and mute affliction. The play, TEACHER, telling the Annie Sullivan Story, was produced at the Red Door Theater in Agawam.
Lyle Pearsons, formerly a Suffield resident and briefly a second-grade teacher at Bridge Street School, has enjoyed the last 25 years operating Kit & Kaboodle at the Red Door Theater of the Hope Community Church in Agawam. Many Suffield families have valued his children’s theater programs.
On a weekend this spring, Lyle produced an extraordinary play at the Red Door, one that he wrote. The play is notable also because it tells the story of a popular heroine who was born in 1866 in Feeding Hills, Agawam. Anne Sullivan was that heroine, but she is most known as the talented, inspirational teacher and life companion to Helen Keller, who as a toddler had become blind, deaf, and unable to speak coherently. That success story has been widely told, but Pearsons, in TEACHER, The Annie Sullivan Story, concentrated entirely on the Agawam hometown heroine.
Ingeniously, most of the play involved three actresses on stage at the same time, all portraying Anne Sullivan. Margie Secora, of the Suffield Players and Red Riding Hood’s Basket fame, was the mature Annie at stage right, dramatically narrating a major part of the story. Pearson’s daughter Jaime, a paraprofessional at McAlister Intermediate School, played the young adult Annie, usually at stage left, narrating her parts of the story. And Suffield fifth-grader Sophie Collins at center stage, already a veteran of the Around Town Singers Junior Chorus, persuasively portrayed the child Annie – intelligent, temperamental, difficult, occasionally heart-breaking. She often acted out segments of the story.
In several key parts of the play, the action was best shown with the actors’ shadows projected on the back-stage curtain from behind. Three students of the Red Door programs helped where needed in certain early shadow scenes. But Sophie played the child Helen Keller along with Jaime as teacher Annie in the climactic shadow scene. This was the breakthrough in communication, when Annie held Helen’s hand in the pump’s water, and Helen realized the meaning of her teacher’s finger-spelling.
Dan Kehoe wrote and played the music for TEACHER, with an impressive prelude along with background for the narratives and action. Several themes were repeated appropriately with variations in key, modality, and otherwise, all with Dan’s great skill. (His recent move south is a serious loss to Suffield.)
In the hand-out program for TEACHER, Lyle Pearsons reported that over the past 25 years Kit & Kaboodle, his non-profit umbrella organization for various theatrical ventures, has staged more than 400 productions. There could not have been many better than the Annie Sullivan Story. It was effective, inspirational, and occasionally tear-producing – all in all a profoundly satisfying theatrical experience.