About the Play:

Monday After the Miracle has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Female/Male Scenes.

Monday After the Miracle is a full-length drama by William Gibson. In this powerful, probing sequel to The Miracle Worker, Helen Keller has started a successful writing career with the help of her teacher, Anne Sullivan, but she must struggle to adjust to Sullivan's marriage to John Macy and her own emerging sexuality.

Monday After the Miracle takes up the story of its famous protagonists in Boston, seventeen years after the events of The Miracle Worker. Helen is now an honour student at Radcliffe, and she and Annie have undertaken to write a book about their remarkable experiences. A young instructor of English from Harvard, John Macy, is engaged to help them, and Annie, yielding to an overpowering need to pursue a life of her own, soon falls in love with him. Their marriage, and the disruptive domestic triangle that results, leads to the compelling crisis of the play. After years of total dedication to her charge, Annie finds her loyalties divided, and Helen, herself aware of strong sexual stirrings, contributes to the growing discord and the inevitable failure of her mentor's marriage. As the play ends the two women accept the inescapable truth of their condition – that they are inextricably bound together and must find, in each other, whatever rewards life might bring.

Monday After the Miracle was first presented in 1982 at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina, and then brought to Broadway at Eugene O'Neill Theatre with Jane Alexander and Karen Allen in the featured roles. The play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and is regularly performed in regional, college, and community theatre productions.

Cast: 2 female, 3 male

What people say:

"It is a play at once more conventional yet potentially more appealing than its predecessor." — New York Post

"Playwright Gibson, Director Arthur Penn and the entire cast ignite one of those blazing bonfires that keep serious dramatic theatre inextinguishable." — Time Magazine

"Monday After the Miracle tells of three unusual people at once locked together in love and torn apart by jealousy." — New York Times

About the Playwright:

William Gibson (1914-2008) was a Tony-award winning American playwright. Over the course of a writing career that lasted seven decades, he wrote many poems, short stories and plays, but had his greatest success with The Miracle Worker. The story of Helen Keller – who could not see, hear or speak – is one of the world's most frequently performed plays.