American playwright William Gibson died on Tuesday at age 94 this week in Massachusetts, a representative of the Finnerty & Stevens Funeral Home in Great Barrington said on Friday. The cause of death was not revealed. Gibson definitely owned his fame for the play he wrote in 1957 entitled “The Miracle Worker,” which was based on the autobiography of the blind and deaf woman, Helen Keller called “The Story of My Life.” The play is focused on the relationship between Helen Keller and her teacher, Annie Sullivan.

Mr. Gibson, whose work appeared on Broadway for five decades, was appreciated among theatre fans for the demanding roles he wrote for women. Nearly half a century later, his most famous play is still performed at regional theaters around the country.

Working frequently with director Arthur Penn, he helped make a star of actress Anne Bancroft in the plays "The Miracle Worker" (1959) and "Two for the Seesaw" (1958). The first, originally written for television, went on Broadway in 1960, where it later won three Tony Awards.

It went on to become a movie in 1962 where it also won several Oscars. The movie won Academy Awards for both its stars, Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke, and garnered Oscar nominations for Gibson and director Arthur Penn.
"Nothing in the theatre this season is as 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."

Gibson wrote more than a dozen plays besides “The Miracle Worker” such as "Two for the Seesaw," which opened on Broadway in 1958, the book for a musical adaptation of “Golden Boy” by Clifford Odets, “Golda’s Balcony” and “The Monday After the Miracle,” a sequel to “The Miracle Worker” that had a brief run on Broadway in 1982. He also wrote "A Mass for the Dead," and "A Cry of Players." Moreover he also published a 1954 novel "The Cobweb," set at a psychiatric hospital and made into a Hollywood film.

Regarding “Golden Boy,” Mr. Gibson was brought in by Penn to complete Clifford Odets' book to the musical when Odets died in 1963. The musical, starring Sammy Davis, Jr., as a young man forced into the quick commercial world of boxing to escape his dead-end circumstances, debuted in 1964. He was again nominated for a Tony.

He had an unexpected late-career hit with an Off-Broadway production of his solo Golda Meir play “Golda's Balcony,” a revision of an earlier play about the Israeli prime minister. It starred Tovah Feldshuh, transferred to Broadway in 2003 and ran for a year-and-a-half.

Gibson was born in the Bronx, New York City, in 1914. 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," according to The Associated Press. Gibson's wife, Margaret Brenman-Gibson, psychologist and author of a study on playwright Clifford Odets, died in 2004.