Say Wa?

The second half of The Miracle Worker is set in the tiny cottage where Annie isolates Helen. There she spells out "doll" and "cake" again and again in the child's hand, trying to show the link between signs and objects. In the end, a splash of water will break the code.

That famous moment at the old-fashioned water pump on the edge of the stage is the big catharsis, of course, for characters, actors and audience. And it's all true. Gibson's play, approved by Helen, was derived from her own memories, including her realization with Annie that "wa-wa" was what she called water as a toddler. The pay-off in this climactic scene is not just Helen's new understanding of words, but her immediate expression of gratitude to Annie Sullivan for giving her a way to say them.

Good theater gives you something to be grateful for too. Here you get the story of Helen Keller's miraculous awakening, as well as the performances of two actresses who find a true bond with their roles and with each other.

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If you go to King of the Road at Undermain, be sure to turn off your cell phones and BlackBerrys, and don't forget to wind your watch back to 1983, the year this sort of "experimental" theater was all the rage. Remember the early 1980s, when theaters suddenly discovered video cameras and started going all multimedia? That's what actor-writer Matthew Posey and his group, The Pioneers of the Suavante-Garde, are up to, trying unsuccessfully to pass off scuzzy writing mixed with old media as the new new thing.

Concocted by Posey and his cast, King of the Road lifts some names and story elements from Death of a Salesman but all comparisons to real art end there. Shades of an X-rated Pee-Wee's Playhouse give way to two hours of nonsensical scenes played out by inmates from the asylum for the criminally creepy.

Posey, a once-handsome actor who's starting to look like John Carradine as he lurches past middle age, plays Bill LaMans, demented, wig-wearing patriarch of a family that performs terrible vaudeville routines. Sons Bif and Hapi (Ben Bryant, Carrie Bourn) seem unaware that under their wigs and baggy pants one of them is a girl. Mom Linda (Walter Hardts) is a black man in a blue hairpiece and pink cocktail dress. Uncle Ben (Kevin Grammer), with various others, pops up on the giant video screen upstage to lip-sync (poorly) tunes from Pink Martini's Sympathique. Quel stale.

The most repeated line of dialogue is "Shut the fuck up!" You'll wish, like after the long ruminations on the "Franco-American War" and on the medical condition of Fidel Castro. Audience members are dragged onstage. Bad magic acts are performed. Actors harness themselves like human puppets and call each other "ass-wipes" and "cocksuckers."

Deep into the second act, as members of the audience begin tunneling out of Undermain's basement theater and up to Main Street to escape the horror, the cast mounts one last assault. One by one, actors bend over and pretend to shoot ping-pong balls from their hindquarters. No actual anuses are visible during the ejection of the little plastic orbs, but it hardly matters. They've pulled the whole show out of their asses, so this part of it hardly comes as a surprise.