What's Up, Alison Pill? The Miracle Worker Star on Anne Sullivan and Milking it with Sean Penn

At just 24, Alison Pill's got the kind of resume people twice her age would kill for. The young actress scored a Tony nomination for her turn in 2006's The Lieutenant of Inishmore and stellar reviews in Blackbird and Mauritius, worked on screen with Sean Penn and Josh Brolin in Milk and flexed her dramatic chops on the acclaimed HBO series In Treatment. To top things off, Pill just began previews at Circle in the Square as teacher Annie Sullivan opposite Academy Award nominee Abigail Breslin's Helen Keller in the first-ever Broadway revival of The Miracle Worker. Broadway.com checked in with Pill to talk about her Broadway return, Anne Sullivan the Punk Rocker and how to get over being starstruck.

Is it true that you and Abigail Breslin have been learning your own secret language for communicating on stage?
Abigail and I have a wonderful class with our choreographer, Lee Sher, that creates a special language based on movement and not speech. For example, Lee can say to me, “Alison, float your bones!” and I’ll know exactly what she means and change how I'm doing something.

I have no idea what you’re talking about.
I really can’t put it into words! It’s one of those things that needs to be shown rather than described. I doubt any audience member would ever notice, because it’s so subtle that when it’s working it just becomes part of the mosaic of the play. It really has been a boon to Abby and myself as far as communicating though. [Anne and Helen] need to have a specific way of moving together that is different from how Helen and everyone else interact so you believe their relationship.

Abigail’s something of an acting prodigy, considering she’s only 13. What’s it been like working with her?
It’s her first play, and my first play co-starring with someone who doesn’t have any lines, so we’re learning a lot together daily. Abigail brings such a rare innocence to the whole experience, which is so nice—I mean, there isn’t a jaded body in that room when [this cast] is together. It’s the anti-cynic cast!

This is your first time back on Broadway since 2007’s Mauritius. How does it feel?
It’s awesome to be back, but interesting since this show is being done in-the-round. On Broadway you’re typically playing to the back of a 1,000-seat house, which can feel miles away. But no matter where you look at [Circle in the Square Theatre], everyone in the audience is right there. It feels like you’re in a 200-seat house, which makes the whole play seem incredibly intimate and distinctly not Broadway. It’s strange to think about 360 degrees of people watching, especially with the level of fighting and physicality in this play. There’s no faking anything! I’m excited about it—except for the fact that I’m notorious for laughing onstage. Usually if something hilarious happens onstage you can just turn away from the audience and have yourself a little chuckle. But there’s no possibility of that here. I’m terrified that I’m going to burst out laughing one night and have no place to hide.

This play is about an incredible teacher. Did you have a teacher that changed your life?
This woman named Jill Frappier was it for me. She ran an amazing drama group that I was part of as a kid in Toronto. I never did a professional play until I moved to New York—everything was these church-basement kind of shows we did with her, but we all became enthusiastic and comfortable in front of an audience. The biggest thing for me in watching someone act on stage is being able to trust that the actor knows what they’re doing, because there is nothing more uncomfortable as an audience member than feeling concerned for the performer. My own natural ease on stage came directly from Jill.

You were a part of the acclaimed film Milk. As a theater actress, was the Hollywood awards season madness surreal?
God, I just love that movie! Yes, it was so surreal. You end up playing a character version of yourself, which is weird. I thankfully only had to go to one awards show, the SAG Awards, and they were actually pretty cool. It’s a dinner, so the whole Milk cast was sitting around the table dressed up together, which was fun—but incredibly strange! You look around and go, “What am I doing here?”

Were you starstruck by anyone?
Honestly no, but that’s because the whole Milk experience made me get over any star-struckness I used to have. Once Sean Penn is a person to you and not Sean Penn, things change. For example, you’ll go, “That’s Diane Lane, she’s Josh’s wife. As in Josh Brolin’s wife.” It’s a totally different way of processing things! These people become human beings you sit down to dinner with, instead of freaks of nature who are either too beautiful or too famous not to treat like an alien.

You’re a music buff. What’s on your Annie Sullivan playlist?
It’s going to sound strange, but there’s a lot of the band Peaches on my Annie Sullivan mix! Their music gets me pumped up—it’s down and dirty and a little vulgar, but a little electro-pop fun, so it helps me keep her energy up. Annie grew up in a poorhouse and had been ghetto-branded as “Boston Irish blind,” so there’s a real fighter in her. She was the type of person who, while she came across as a respectable governess, was really a street urchin.

So Annie Sullivan was really just an early punk rocker?
I could totally see that. She was a total badass.