![]() Modeled on the English workhouse system, most almshouses tried to defray their costs by using inmates for forced labor. Institutions called "almshouses" or "asylums" sprang up in eighteenth-century America to house a wide-ranging collection of society's outcasts. Events in History at the Time the Play Takes PlaceĪlmshouses. Anne Sullivan's subsequent achievements, especially her heroic efforts to communicate with Helen Keller, served as the cornerstone of Gibson's play The Miracle Worker. Through Sullivan's letters, Gibson learned about the almshouses to which disabled children were often abandoned. ![]() Sullivan had herself been half-blind as a child and had experienced obstacles that confronted the disabled. As an adult, he became fascinated with Anne Sullivan's famous triumph as the teacher of a deaf and blind girl named Helen Keller. After it was warmly received by television audiences, it was rewritten for the stage and opened on Broadway in 1959 at the Playhouse Theatre. ![]() William Gibson was born in the Bronx, a borough in New York City, in 1914. The Miracle Worker dramatizes the volatile relationship between the lonely teacher and her charge. Initially written for television, The Miracle Worker by William Gibson first aired in 1957. ![]()
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