Members of the Denver Center Theatre Company’s current production of “The Miracle Worker” believe the classic Helen Keller play will stand as both eulogy and legacy to the playwright who died Tuesday at 94.
“Gibson’s work is so well-written, so well-constructed, that the play nearly plays itself,” said Kate Hurster, who is portraying Annie Sullivan in the Denver Center’s production at the Space Theatre through Dec. 20.
The 1960 Tony-winning best play is the inspirational story of how partially blind teacher Sullivan learned how to communicate with the deaf, blind and mute girl in 1880s Alabama.
“Gibson wrote ‘The Miracle Worker’ during an era when many of the other plays produced are no longer relevant or viable,” Hurster said. “He achieved greatness by creating a dramatic work that avoids the saccharine, and the play continues to prove moving and inspirational. It is truly a gift to be able to speak words he crafted so well.”
Douglas Langworthy, dramaturg and literary manager for the Denver Center Theatre Company, calls “The Miracle Worker” deceptively well-structured.
“The entire play is a slow and steady buildup to the famous final moment when Helen makes her miraculous breakthrough at the water pump,” he said. “Starting with her family’s overindulgent child-rearing and building to Annie’s relentless, repetitive attempts to show her that every object has a name, Gibson presents a brilliant object lesson in the rigorous art of teaching. The moment when Helen finally understands brings about in the audience a kind of catharsis most often found in Greek drama. This is without a doubt one of the most emotionally powerful and satisfying endings to a play in the American canon.”
Gibson was particularly known for creating demanding roles for women. Sullivan and Keller constitute two of the most emotionally and physically taxing characters ever created for the stage.
“In choosing to focus on this small but pivotal slice of Helen Keller’s and Annie Sullivan’s biographies, Gibson mines his material for maximum drama,” Langworthy said. “He may be gone, but his masterpiece will surely live on.”
Gibson died Tuesday at his home in Stockbridge, Mass.
John Moore: 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com
The Associated Press news story
By Polly Anderson
Playwright William Gibson,
whose “The Miracle Worker” has thrilled audiences for nearly a
half-century with the true story of the deaf-blind Helen Keller’s
rescue from a world of ignorance, has died. He was 94.
Gibson died Tuesday in Stockbridge, Mass., according to the
Finnerty & Stevens Funeral Home in Great Barrington.
Gibson wrote a dozen plays, including the Tony-winning “Two for
the Seesaw,” but would be forever known for “The Miracle Worker.”
First written for television, the story of a young Keller forging a
relationship with her teacher, Annie Sullivan, made its Broadway
debut in 1959.
“Nothing in the theatre this season is so overwhelming as the last
inarticulate but eloquent scene in which a frantic little girl for
the first time understands the meaning of a word and realizes that
the teacher is not a fiend but a friend,” New York Times critic
Brooks Atkinson wrote. “One small but blinding ray of light has
penetrated the frightening darkness.” The production, directed by
Arthur Penn and starring Anne Bancroft and 12-year-old Patty Duke,
earned Tonys in 1960 for best play, best actress (Bancroft) and
best director. It was made into a movie in 1962, bringing Academy
Awards for Bancroft, as best actress, and Duke, best supporting
actress, and Oscar nominations for Penn and Gibson.
“The Miracle Worker” came a year after Gibson’s first
professionally produced play, “Two for the Seesaw,” also a major
success.
The 1958 romantic drama about a straight-laced lawyer who falls in
love with a dancer brought Bancroft her first Tony and also
nominations for best play and best director (Penn.) The 1962 film
version starred Robert Mitchum and Shirley MacLaine.
Gibson garnered another Tony nomination in 1965 as co-author of
“Golden Boy,” a musical version of the play by Clifford Odets. It
starred Sammy Davis Jr.
“The act of writing makes everything possible to me,” Gibson said
in a 2003 interview with The Associated Press at his home in
Stockbridge, Mass. “I’ve always found the business of writing has
helped me to live.” Gibson’s last Broadway play was “Golda’s
Balcony,” a one-woman show starring Tovah Feldshuh as Israeli prime
minister Golda Meir during one of her most difficult times – the
1973 Yom Kippur War.
It was a heavily revised version of “Golda,” Gibson’s 1977
Broadway flop that featured a large cast and Bancroft in the title
role.
Although the 2003 play marked the last time Gibson wrote for
Broadway, he continued to write novels, short stories and poetry.
Gibson was born in the Bronx, New York City, in 1914. A skittish
teenager who found comfort in Broadway shows and the written word,
Gibson studied creative writing at City College.
His first moneymaking piece was a short story published in Esquire
for $150 during the 1930s. At the suggestion of his agent, Gibson
began writing for the stage. He wrote five plays while honing his
skills at the Topeka Civic Theatre in Kansas, then returned to New
York and started work on “Two for the Seesaw,” which ran for more
than 700 performances in New York.
After selling “Two for the Seesaw” to Hollywood for $600,000,
Gibson moved to the Berkshires with his wife, Margaret, and began
writing “The Miracle Worker.” The story was first done for
television’s “Playhouse 90.” It took three weeks to write. When he
decided to rewrite the teleplay for the stage, Gibson spent six
months on the project.
Keller was born in Alabama in 1880 and stricken deaf and blind at
the age of 19 months. The events described in the play occurred in
1887, when Sullivan came to teach the 6-year-old, spelling into her
hand until the mute, near-wild girl realized what language was.
With Sullivan at her side for nearly a half-century, Keller grew
into a world-famous author and humanitarian.
Nearing 80 when Gibson’s television play was written, Keller was
initially dubious about the idea but later had a positive opinion
about it, according to the book “Helen Keller: A Life” by Dorothy
Herrmann.
Coming full circle, “The Miracle Worker” was remade as a
television film in 1979, with Duke in Bancroft’s old role as
Sullivan and Melissa Gilbert of “Little House on the Prairie” as
Helen. Another TV version, in 2000, broke with its predecessors by
using 8-year-old Hallie Kate Eisenberg, rather than a teenager, to
play little Helen.
The play also is an annual event at Ivy Green, Keller’s birthplace
in Tuscumbia, Ala., where it is staged on the grounds where
Sullivan actually taught the girl more than a century ago.
Gibson’s wife, Margaret Brenman-Gibson, psychologist and author of
a study on playwright Clifford Odets, died in 2004.
