Broadway Playwright William Gibson; Won Tony for 'The Miracle Worker'

Actress Anne Bancroft, center, with William Gibson and Gibson's wife, Margaret, at the Broadway play "Golda" in 1977, one of several collaborations between Bancroft and Gibson. (Associated Press)

After dropping out of the City College of New York in 1932, Mr. Gibson floated around: acting in Abingdon, Va., becoming an organizer in the Young Communist League and playing piano in Topeka, Kan., where he had moved with his wife, a psychoanalyst and future Odets biographer.

She supported him financially for the next 15 years as Mr. Gibson won prizes for his poetry and published a collection of verse, "Winter Crook" (1948). "It wasn't a practical life," he told the Hartford Courant years later, "but there was nachas -- rewards, in Yiddish -- enough to keep you going on to the next project."

His wife, the former Margaret Brenman, died in 2004. Survivors include two sons, Thomas Gibson of Stockbridge and Daniel Gibson of Cambridge, Mass.

A mental clinic was the setting for Mr. Gibson's first novel, "The Cobweb" (1954), which received good reviews and was turned into a film the next year with Richard Widmark and Lauren Bacall.

The Hollywood paycheck allowed the Gibsons to settle in Stockbridge, in western Massachusetts, where the author completed what became his first stage success, "Two for the Seesaw."

The show concerned a married Midwestern lawyer, played by Henry Fonda, and his affair with a heartbroken but life-embracing New York gamine, portrayed by Bancroft. Reviewers highlighted Mr. Gibson's deftness at creating dialogue for two strikingly different accents -- Midwestern WASP and Nyu Yawk bohemian.

Mr. Gibson made a financial windfall on the movie rights, which became a 1962 film starring Shirley MacLaine and Robert Mitchum. A musical version, with music and lyrics by Cy Coleman and Dorothy Fields, ran on Broadway in 1973.

In 2005, he told the Hartford Courant that it was director Penn's idea to give Sullivan an Irish brogue in "The Miracle Worker." The reason was to help Bancroft, who was having difficulty getting rid of her accent from "Two for the Seesaw."

"But Annie Sullivan never had a brogue," Mr. Gibson said, "and now whenever the play is done the character has a brogue."