LIANE HANSEN, Host: Playwright William Gibson is 80 years old today. He's best known for his Tony-award-winning play, The Miracle Worker. His subsequent works had moderate success, but six years ago he left the theater for good, and remains ambivalent about his experience there. Gibson now lives in western Massachusetts, where he's writing a novel. Charlene Scott of member station WFCR in Amherst prepared our birthday profile.

CHARLENE SCOTT, Reporter, WFCR: William Gibson says he was 26 years old when he realized that he had spent the previous five years writing poems and earning only $100. His agent told him theater was where the money was, but Gibson didn't fare much better there. After an initial success with the Kryev Players [sp], it took Gibson another ten years to get a play produced professionally. Two for the Seesaw was turned down by 14 producers before it finally made it to Broadway in 1958 where it was a huge success. The play was produced this year as part of an 80th birthday tribute to Gibson at the Berkshire Theater Festival [sp], which he helped found. Ted Marcoutes [sp] played Jerry Ryan, and Jody Phelan [sp] played Gitel Masca [sp].

`GITEL MASCA': [from `Two for the Seesaw'] Are you broke, Jerry?
'JERRY RYAN': What kind of name is `Gitel'? It has an exotic ring. Eskimo, or-?
GITEL: Polish. Are you?
JERRY: Polish?
GITEL: Broke.
JERRY: Why do you ask?
GITEL: Well, I just want to know if that's what keeping you up nights. If it is, why don't we go a show and out to eat? We could have gone Dutch, at least.
JERRY: I thought you were Italian.
GITEL: Who me? Jewish.
JERRY: Masca?
GITEL: Oh, that's exotic. It's my stage name.
JERRY: What stage are you in?
GITEL: Huh?
JERRY: What's your real name?

SCOTT: Two for the Seesaw tells the story of a brief love affair between two misfits; an out-of-work lawyer and an unemployed dancer. In the original Broadway production, Anne Bancroft played Gitel and Henry Fonda played Jerry. The two were not well-matched, according to Arthur Penn, who directed the New York premiere.
ARTHUR PENN, Director: Annie was full out, only knew how to play with- with the fullest emotion. Hank always did what we in the actors studio called indicated emotion rather than- than experience it, and so consequently, Annie's fulsome emotion, which often eventuated in tears and, as he said on one occasion, `I can't kiss her. She's got snot running out of her nose.'
SCOTT: The difference in acting styles meant William Gibson had to do extensive rewrites, which he hated. He refused to go and see the play for six months after it opened.
Gibson's feelings about his works are such that he hasn't granted an interview in 13 years, but as part of the Berkshire Theater Festival's birthday celebration, he did agree to give a press conference. He said that the experience of getting Two for the Seesaw to Broadway taught him that once a playwright gives a script to actors and directors, it's no longer his.
WILLIAM GIBSON, Playwright: The theater is, you know, a fascinating place as well as a horrible place. And, as my business manager once said, `As a business, it's stupid. It's a stupid business.' But the fact is that there's a kind of life, a creative life, in the theater, which is very hard to do without if you're enamored of it, and I think that I- I am- I speak, I think, more ambivalently than most playwrights would.
SCOTT: Nevertheless, shortly after Two for the Seesaw opened, Gibson finished The Miracle Worker, a play based on the relationship between young Helen Keller and the teacher who tries to help the blind, deaf, and mute girl learn to communicate. The Miracle Worker won the Tony Award for best play of the 1959-60 season. When MGM wanted to buy the rights to make it into a movie, William Gibson agreed to adapt the play for the screen, he says, because he worried that Hollywood would ruin it.
Mr. GIBSON: With The Miracle Worker, I didn't do the screenplay for that because Helen Keller was still alive and I felt I couldn't entrust it to anybody else. It would end up having Helen marry Alexander Graham Bell, or something.
SCOTT: Patty Duke won an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of Helen Keller in the film, a role she originated on Broadway. Anne Bancroft won an Oscar as best actress for her role as Helen's teacher.

`ANN SULLIVAN': [from `The Miracle Worker'] I want complete charge of her.
`Mr. KELLER': You already have that.
Ms. SULLIVAN: No. I mean day and night. She has to be dependent on me.
`Mrs. KELLER': For what?
Ms. SULLIVAN: Everything. The food she eats, the clothes she wears, fresh air - yes, the air she breathes. Whatever her body needs is a primer to teach her out of. It's the only way. The one who lets her have it should be her teacher, not anyone who loves her.
`Mrs. KELLER': But she runs from you to us.
Ms. SULLIVAN: Yes, that's the point.

SCOTT: Bancroft also originated her role on Broadway, and says she feels lucky to have worked with William Gibson.
ANNE BANCROFT, Actress: We're both interested in the same thing. In fact, not only interested but fascinated and obsessed, even, by the same things. He would be fascinated by this woman. Well, he- I was, too, as soon as I read it. And he's fascinated by the characters of women, the psyche of women, and- and I am, too.
SCOTT: Bancroft starred in three of William Gibson's most successful plays, Two for the Seesaw, The Miracle Worker, and Golda, the story of Israeli leader Golda Meir. But after Golda closed in 1978, Gibson never had another success in New York, and he gave up on the theater. Anne Bancroft calls that a tragedy.
Ms. BANCROFT: I am so sorry that every once in awhile, I cry about it, and I'm not joking. I- every once in awhile, I think, `What the hell happened?'
SCOTT: And, whatever happened, she says, it came at a time when the theater really needed Gibson.
Ms. BANCROFT: It's just empty. It's empty. There's no depth. There's no real- I mean, it's difficult to find something where you really find someone searching.
SCOTT: For the last five years, William Gibson has been working on a novel. The final page, he says, is already written. It reads, `This novel was interrupted by death.' For National Public Radio, I'm Charlene Scott.