Abigail Breslin: Little Miss Miracle
A wonderful article from The New York Times about Abigail Breslin's recent Broadway debut as Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker, that discusses how she prepared for the role and what it will effect her career as the nearly 14-year-old transitions from child to teen star.
Losing control and making it seem real is one of the most difficult challenges an actor can face. Children, lacking both life experience and training, can have a harder time - which is why the role of Helen Keller, the blind and deaf child at the heart of William Gibson’s play The Miracle Worker, is one of the most difficult in drama; the character must be chiefly expressed through physical action.
Taking up the challenge of Helen is the latest in a series of diverse career choices by the 13-year-old actress Abigail Breslin, best known as the bespectacled beauty-pageant aspirant Olive Hoover in Little Miss Sunshine (2006), a role for which Breslin, at age 10, became one of the youngest nominees ever for an Academy Award for best supporting actress. Making her New York stage debut, Breslin is playing Helen in the first Broadway revival of The Miracle Worker in almost 50 years. Preview performances began March 3 at Circle in the Square Theater.
But during a recent interview Breslin - who cooed over American Idol; her dog, Sully; and the new jacket she bought with her Christmas money at Bloomingdale’s - did not betray any off-putting Serious Actress airs. “I don’t really remember,” she said, when asked about her audition for her first film role, at the age of 5, for the sci-fi thriller Signs. And she laughed at the suggestion that she might have mapped out a post-nomination career strategy to do films as varied as the kid flick Kit Kittredge: An American Girl and Zombieland, in which she played a gun-toting con artist known as Little Rock.
“I like taking part in stories that I would want to read, and I chose characters primarily on whether she would be someone I’d want to be friends with in real life,” Breslin said over dinner, joined by her mother and her publicist at a Union Square restaurant not far from the East Village apartment where she has lived her entire life with her family.
“I’ve always wanted to play Helen, ever since I read a kid’s biography of her, one of those learning-to-read books - it was 20 pages, and I read it seven times in two days,” she continued. “But when I read a script, I’m not thinking about my, you know, my image, I guess you’d call it. I don’t feel any pressure to think about that. I’m kind of a very boring person. I don’t think anyone would have any fun paying attention to me.”
While she may not be a paparazzi magnet, Breslin is nevertheless an object of some fascination in the world of child and teenage actors because her career, at least at this point, seems to have no limits. Few children have played as many leading and key supporting roles in high-profile films as Breslin, who has logged almost 20 movies that have together grossed a total of $700 million. Jodie Foster, Natalie Portman and 15-year-old Dakota Fanning (War of the Worlds, The Secret Life of Bees) are some of her forerunners. (Asked who she admired most as an actress, Breslin named Meryl Streep.)
“I think it’s very telling to watch the film choices of actresses like Dakota and Abigail, because what they’re doing right is challenging themselves by doing different roles in picture after picture,” said Cindy Osbrink, Fanning’s manager. Beth Cannon, who has been Breslin’s manager since the actress was 5, said that her client’s films were chosen for artistic merit first, and that Breslin was an “avid reader” of scripts. (The actress seconded this.) But Cannon also said that serious thought and, yes, long-term career strategy were involved with each new Breslin film.
“When we choose a project, we talk about: ‘What is this project going to bring you next? What choices will it open up for you next?’ ” Ms. Cannon said. “After Little Miss Sunshine, Abby had a very big adult audience. So we made a very strategic choice to do Nim’s Island and Kit Kittredge, to get the kid audience, because we knew we needed the younger demographic for her to continue her trajectory to be a star who could at some point hopefully open a movie. And then we went back to movies like Zombieland, which we knew would be for the teens and 20-somethings.”
Of course, in the next few years, Breslin will begin navigating the waters of teenage-romance scripts and more provocative fare that some child stars have found treacherous on their course to eventual adult roles. Cannon said that one advantage Breslin had was a lack of pressure from her family, or herself, to work on projects that were artistically weak but financially lucrative. Her mother Kim said Abigail could walk away from the business any time she wanted and was under no obligation to take teenage-movie roles that she wasn’t excited by.
A Broadway debut in a leading role, on the other hand, is a good way to enhance Ms. Breslin’s skill set, in this case requiring her to tackle the frustration, rage and curiosity of Helen Keller. With almost no dialogue, Helen is physically volcanic, and her primary relationship in the play - with her teacher, Annie Sullivan (Alison Pill) - is acted out with thrusts and parries, slaps and pinches. Kate Whoriskey, the play’s director, held a weeklong workshop with Breslin and Pill before rehearsals solely to focus on the physical interplay between the two actresses.
“For me the big question of the play is: How do you choreograph and work with a character who doesn’t have any language and is one of the leads?” said Whoriskey. “Abby is extraordinary in that she’ll do anything you ask, and do it quite well, and she draws on this enormous empathy that she has for her character.”
One key to Breslin’s preparation has been Lee Sher, the production’s physical-training adviser, who works with Breslin and Pill for an hour before each rehearsal. Sher trained the two women in the art of Gaga movement, in which performers tap into energies and emotions to develop a physical language that circumvents habits of communication based on dialogue. Sher said these movement techniques are well suited to Helen, noting, for instance, the crucial scene when Annie and Helen match strength and wits at the breakfast table. The scene runs to four pages of dialogue-free stage directions in the script.
“For scenes like that we have to help Abby’s body find a new way of being - the way she moves, the way she sits, the way she reacts to Annie - so that the audience will not feel so familiar with the ways that Abby’s Helen acts and reacts,” Sher said. “Abby, Kate and I want the audience to feel that Helen could do something unpredictable, wild or scary at any moment.”
Breslin’s capacity to learn these techniques has less to do with maturity, said her co-star Pill, than with a certain courage to try things. “It takes a lot of bravery for a 13-year-old, or anyone else, to be the only person in a scene to take control of the situation and respond to something other than what the seeing, hearing people are responding to,” Pill said.
As much as anything, Breslin’s preparation focused on making sure that she was not hurting Pill - or herself - when Helen lashes out, by practicing the stage movements of Whoriskey and Sher “a million times, so I could do it without even noticing.”
“That long breakfast scene between Helen and Annie is one of the most challenging things I’ve ever done, but it’s also the most fun,” Ms. Breslin said. “I’m trying to remember what body part goes where, and what to do with my mouth, and training my eyes, and training myself not to speak. It’s really, really fun.”
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