I was sad to learn today that William Gibson, incredible playwright and a major inspiration and influence to me, died this week.
Gibson’s success as a playwright came in this 50s. He said, Good things come to those who wait … far too long…. and
Writers go bad when the angels desert them…. Dylan Thomas was a marvelous poet and drank himself to death. Somewhere along the way, the angel left him. An angel has left me too, but the writing angel is still with me. And that’s the thing where I feel most alive — at least while I’m doing it. I started out to be a writer and I’m still a writer. Not bad (TheDay.com).
Here are some interesting articles commemorating Gibson’s life and craft:
Associated Press, Telegraph (UK), and a great one from the Washington Post which quotes Gibson, discussing his most well known play The Miracle Worker:
The author of ‘The Miracle Worker’ believed in children, was young, energetic, incorrigibly optimistic, no stranger to the ‘uplifting’ in life; these are not objectionable qualities, and they flowed naturally into the script.
And it was obviously a love-letter…. I like to fall a little in love with my heroines, and the title — from Mark Twain, who said, ‘Helen is a miracle, and Miss Sullivan is the miracle-worker’ — was meant to show where my affections lay. This stubborn girl of 20, who six years earlier could not write her name, and in one month salvaged Helen’s soul, and lived thereafter in its shadow, seemed to me to deserve a star bow.
Here’s a complete list of his dramatic works that appeared on Broadway from the Internet Broadway Database:
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