In this excerpt, Kerr praises Gibson's skill in telling an emotionally gripping story while avoid-ing the pitfalls of melodrama.

Kerr is an American dramatist, director, and critic who won a Pulitzer Prize for drama criticism in 1978.

If it is sometimes difficult to make ugliness palatable, it is even more difficult to make goodness persuasive.

All audiences love to have their emotions stirred in the theater, and all audiences hate to have their emotions stirred too easily. The greatest danger author William Gibson faced in telling the story of Helen Keiler in The Miracle Worker was that of arousing the quick, instinctive resentment of people who might come to feel that they had opened their hearts to a setup.

The materials for too many tears, too easily drawn, were there. The child Helen Keller, deaf, dumb, and blind, was at once an object of pity. We were apt...