Inspired by the ordeal educator Annie Sullivan underwent in trying to teach the dumb, deaf and blind Helen Keller how to learn, he wrote an 1880s-set teleplay called "The Miracle Worker" for Playhouse 90. Gibson's second Broadway effort landed him a permanent place in regional and community theatre for the next half-century.
In one section, during the Philadelphia tryout, he wrote that he suffered the "paradoxical experience of seeing his work improve by becoming poorer."
The following year, he published a memoir, "The Seesaw Log," related his alarm and ambivalence to the events that surrounded him becoming a successful playwright. He was pressured to make numerous changes to the script to satisfy the box-office-minded producer and the star, Henry Fonda, who had grown dissatisfied with his part. The production would run 750 performances with such actors as Dana Andrews, Lee Grant, Hal March and Darren McGavin.ĭespite his success, the serious-minded Gibson - whose plays often dealt with historical characters and eras - was not altogether pleased with the experience. Bancroft won a Tony Award for her performance, and the play was nominated for the award. The 1958 two-hander Two for the Seesaw, directed by Arthur Penn, starred film star Henry Fonda as a Nebraska lawyer in the process of divorcing his wife and then-unknown Anne Bancroft as a younger, needy dancer trying to make it in New York, with whom the Fonda character begins an unlikely romance.
The New York City-born writer struck gold with his first outing on Broadway (though, by that time, he had already written a number of unproduced plays, and was a published novelist).
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