Helen Keller a stiff test of Breslin's stage skill

NEW YORK — 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 an even 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 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.

“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,” Breslin said.

Few children have played as many leading and key supporting roles in high-profile and studio films as Breslin, who has logged almost 20 movies that have together grossed $700 million.

Beth Cannon, who has been Breslin's manager since the actress was 5, said Breslin's films were chosen for artistic merit first. But Cannon also said serious thought and 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?'” Cannon said. “After ‘Little Miss Sunshine,' she 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.”

A Broadway debut in a leading role, on the other hand, is a good way to enhance Breslin's skill set, in this case requiring her to tackle the frustration, rage and curiosity of Helen Keller.

With almost no dialogue, the Helen of “The Miracle Worker” 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.

“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 director Kate 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.”

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