Now with that same team, Gibson's drama is gearing up for the big assault on New York. Time magazine proclaimed the production 'one of those blazing bonfires that keep serious theater inextinguishable' and advised Broadway to take note. Arthur Penn, who staged 'The Miracle Worker,' was back in the director's seat, and the cast list was headed by Karen Allen as Helen, Jane Alexander as her indefatigable mentor, and William Converse-Roberts as John Macy, the 25-year-old former Harvard professor who comes into their entangled lives, initially to edit a series of articles that will become Helen's autobiography. Whatever darker strains it may embody, 'Monday After the Miracle' attracted considerable attention last spring when it premiered at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, S.C. I don't want people expecting more of the same.' The reason I resist having people think of it as a sequel is because the joyful affirmation that they got out of 'A Miracle Worker' is not what characterizes this play. But it's also a play about parents and their child - their grown-up, needy child.

So it becomes, in effect, an odd kind of triangle play.

This is a play about her marriage, with Helen in the house. But in 'Miracle Worker,' Annie was 20, and here she's in her late thirties and forties. Certainly it has characters who bear the same names. 'It's a different play entirely and it comes out of a quite different period of my life. 'I resist calling 'Monday After the Miracle' a sequel,' he says. The term has been brought up before, one gathers, and Gibson would just as soon lay it to rest once and for all.

The great forbidding growth of eyebrows that extends across his otherwise pleasant face in a nearly unbroken line bristles perceptibly. Gibson, however, balks when the word 'sequel' is raised. A natural double bill for an industrious repertory company somewhere. And 'Monday After the Miracle,' set 20 years later, is about to show the theater-going public what happened to those remarkable beings 20 years later. Playwright William Gibson has no difficulties picturing the day when 'The Miracle Worker,' his celebrated 1959 drama and 'Monday After the Miracle,' his newest effort for Broadway stage, will be playing back to back.Īfter all, the former, which has acquired a reputation as one of the contemporary theater's more life-enhancing experiences, depicts the arduous education of the savage young Helen Keller at the hands of Annie Sullivan, the gifted teacher who led her out of deafness and blindness into the light of civilization.

The miracle worker gibson