[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 at once factual and dramatically vivid.

He has then turned to the story of nurse Annie Sullivan and extracted from it every last ounce of its heroism, its brisk Irish comedy, and its private pathos. Annie Sullivan, it seems, was herself an abandoned child, herself illiterate, herself once blind. Miss Sullivan's pig-headed and apparently losing battle to...