Near the conclusion of Two for the Seesaw, the rambunctious street urchin, Gittel Mosca, is gently informed that "after the verb to love, to help is the sweetest in the tongue." William Gibson, setting aside more serious concerns to anatomize the sweeter, softer virtues, has thus far dedicated his dramatic career to the definition and conjugation of these two verbs. For, like the play which preceded it, The Miracle Worker—written with the same wit …—is essentially a two-ch...

[In "The Miracle Worker"] William Gibson has done all of the stirring, frightening, theatrically explosive things that his subject matter suggests. He has shown us the blind, deaf, and mute Helen Keller at the age of five or six, and shown her to us for what she then was: an animal. He has let her claw at the family that would have bestowed tenderness on her, spit in the face of the one woman who might save her, tear a household to tatters—very, very literally—in a manner that is...

Consider the image of the young Helen Keller that aches like a wound at the center of Mr. William Gibson's "The Miracle Worker": the child locked in the body's cage against sight, speech, sound, her skin alone a raw key to the world, the very fact of her a majestic rebuke to all easy imaginations of justice and rationality. Mr. Gibson's account of the breaking of that cage—of Anne Sullivan's forceful entry into a demonic world of lawless, feral impulse—...

["The Miracle Worker"] could scarcely be nobler, or more squarely affirm the dignity of our wayward species. [William Gibson] does not sentimentalize the struggle between Annie and her charge. Chairs are flung about, plates smashed, arms wrenched, and faces slapped;… the combat could hardly be more violent…. Yet apart from the moment when [Helen Keller sniffing and groping, met Annie Sullivan] for the first time, I was unmoved throughout. A few years back, I saw a documentary fil...

The awakening of Helen Keller's mind is a furious battle [in "The Miracle Worker"]…. [And even] when the battling is not physical, it is a determined struggle for victory by two people of strong wills. When it is over and the mind of the child acquires its first word ("water"), the peace of surrender in terms of love and recognition is the climax of the play and an electric moment in the theatre.