Producer David Richenthal announced the casting and theatre on Oct. 28. Kate Whoriskey (Ruined) will direct the William Gibson play, to begin an in-the-round staging at Circle in the Square Theatre (235 West 50th Street) on Feb. 12, 2010, followed by an opening night of March 3 2010.

Additional casting will be announced shortly.

“Set in the South in the 1880s, The Miracle Worker tells the story of real-life Medal of Freedom winner Helen Keller, born blind and deaf, and the extraordinary teacher who taught her to communicate with the world, Annie Sullivan,” according to production notes.

Young film star Breslin will make her Broadway debut in the role of Helen Keller. She appeared at age five in M. Night Shyamalan’s 2002 film, “Signs,” and received an Academy Award nomination for her critically-acclaimed title role performance in the film comedy “Little Miss Sunshine,” for which she was Oscar-nominated in the Supporting Actress category. Breslin’s other film credits include “Raising Helen,” “No Reservations,” “Definitely Maybe,” “Nim’s Island,” “Kit Kittredge: An American Girl,” “My Sister’s Keeper” and the current release “Zombieland.”

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Pill returns to the stage following starring on Broadway in Mauritius and in the Off-Broadway hits reasons to be pretty and Blackbird, for which she received Lucille Lortel, Outer Critics Circle and Drama League Award nominations. She was nominated for a Tony Award as Featured Actress in a Play for her Broadway debut in The Lieutenant of Inishmore. She recently appeared in the feature film “Milk,” and in the HBO series, “In Treatment.”

Whoriskey most recently staged the acclaimed and much-extended world premiere of Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize winning play Ruined at the Goodman Theatre and Manhattan Theatre Club. She directed the Goodman’s Heartbreak House, The Rose Tattoo and the world premiere of Drowning Crow, plus Antigone at South Coast Repertory, where she also directed the world premiere of Nottage’s Intimate Apparel. She staged the world premiere of Nottage’s Fabulation at Playwrights Horizons.

Richenthal (Death of a Salesman, Long Days Journey Into Night, The Crucible and I Am My Own Wife) is the lead producer of Broadway’s current revival of Finian’s Rainbow.

The inspiring 1959 play based on the young life of the internationally-known Keller famously starred Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke, on stage and film. This is being billed as the 50th anniversary production of the play.

In 2003, Fran and Barry Weissler launched a Broadway-aimed Miracle Worker in North Carolina. Oscar winner Hilary Swank starred. The producers opted to close the show after its Charlotte run.

The Miracle Worker, which still shocks modern audiences for the physicality and violence from the actresses playing Helen and Annie, won six Tony Awards, including one for Best Play in 1960. Anne Bancroft (who won the Best Actress Tony) and Patty Duke were the original stars, and repeated their roles on film.

Bancroft and Duke both won Oscars for their performances. Duke later played Annie in a TV film of the work, with Melissa Gilbert as Helen. A theatrical sequel, Monday After the Miracle, showed Helen and Annie as adults, dealing with very different issues.

Playwright William Gibson died in 2008. Gibson’s Miracle Worker was originally presented as a TV drama for “Playhouse 90.” His plays include Two for the Seesaw, A Cry of Players, Golda, The Butterfingers Angel, Handy Dandy and Goodly Creatures. He is the author of a novel, “The Cobweb,” as well as the musical version of Clifford Odets’ Golden Boy. His books include “The Seesaw Log,” “A Mass for the Dead,” “A Season in Heaven” and a volume of poetry entitled “Winter Crook,” plus “Shakespeare’s Game,” a critical study.

For more information, visit www.miracleworkeronbroadway.com.

Jack and Diane, two teenage girls, meet in New York City and spend the night kissing ferociously. Diane’s charming innocence quickly begins to open Jack’s tough skinned heart. But, when Jack discovers that Diane is leaving the country in a week she tries to push her away. Diane must struggle to keep their love alive while hiding the secret that her newly awakened sexual desire is giving her werewolf-like visions

AS girls Alison Pill, the actor, and Sarah Treem, the playwright, never stuttered when adults asked them what they wanted to be when they grew up.

Ms. Pill hired an agent at 10 after a successful gig reading textbooks on tape and quickly found steady work on American and Canadian television in Toronto, her hometown. Ms. Treem was 12 when her first play — written in rhyming couplets with the refrain “Who am I going to sit with at lunch?” — won a statewide young playwrights contest and was staged in Connecticut.

From early on, the two precocious girls impressed adults with their unwavering drive until suddenly, disconcertingly, they were adults themselves, wondering: Were they really good at what they did, or had they just been good for their age? Would they be accepted by their professional mentors as peers? Did their achievements make them happy?

Last winter, when Ms. Pill, 23, and Ms. Treem, then 28, were both grappling with such questions, they came together and bonded fiercely on the set of “In Treatment,” the HBO therapy drama starring Gabriel Byrne. They had become friendly the summer before at the Sundance Institute Theater Lab, but with “In Treatment” their connection intensified as Ms. Treem wrote the seven episodes for Ms. Pill’s character, April, a smart, complicated, stubbornly independent architecture student with whom they both identified.

“Alison kept reading the scripts, saying, ‘You’re writing my life,’ and I was like, ‘No, actually, I’m writing my life,’ ” Ms. Treem said during a recent joint interview with Ms. Pill. “We just hit a perfect storm of personality and art. It will probably never happen again.”

Ms. Pill, the more effervescent of the two, countered: “Sure it will. You can just keep writing for me, Sarah. It’s cool. Just write stuff, and then I’ll do it.”

For the sake of this article, Ms. Pill and Ms. Treem were speaking — animatedly, their words spilling over each other’s — via an Internet videophone hook-up. Ms. Pill, who is strawberry blond and slender with a cherubic face, lives in the East Village; Ms. Treem, tall and dark-haired with an intense poise, lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn. But the two friends have not been in the city simultaneously since “In Treatment” began its second season early last month. (The show’s sixth episode featuring April is Sunday night, and its final one is May 24.)

Ms. Pill has been back in Toronto shooting “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” a Universal Pictures movie starring Michael Cera in which she plays the drummer in his band. This caps a busy 15 months in which she turned in a memorable performance in “Milk” as Harvey Milk’s motorcycle-driving lesbian campaign manager, earned critical praise as an expletive-spitting powerhouse of rage in Neil LaBute’s play “reasons to be pretty,” spent three weeks at Sundance and then, after Ms. Treem recommended her for the part, did “In Treatment.”

Ms. Treem, meanwhile, has been in Los Angeles, ensconced in “writers’ room” for a forthcoming HBO comedy, “How to Make It in America.” A graduate of the Yale School of Drama, she has written for both seasons of “In Treatment” alongside veteran playwrights like Marsha Norman (“’night, Mother”) and Warren Leight (“Side Man”). She is that show’s youngest writer, just as, when she made her New York debut two years ago with her play “A Feminine Ending,” she was among the youngest playwrights ever produced by Playwrights Horizons.

Mr. Leight, executive producer for this season’s “In Treatment,” described the collaboration between Ms. Pill and Ms. Treem as an uncommon one in television, a result of their friendship, their natural talent — “like the kid from the minors who throws 100 miles per hour” — and the intimacy of the show itself. Both actor and writer were “cast” for the role, Mr. Leight said, and the matchmaking resulted in “a nice marriage” that produced the character of April, who resembles “both of them a lot.”

When the Internet conversation began, Ms. Pill, who was on a filming break in New York, lighted up at the sight of Ms. Treem’s face materializing on a screen. They briefly caught up on developments — “I cut my hair,” Ms. Pill said. “I learned how to play the drums.” — and then turned to some initial reactions to “In Treatment,” in which April confesses to her new therapist, Paul Weston (Mr. Byrne), that she has cancer but is not seeking treatment or telling her parents about it.

“I showed the first four episodes to my parents in one go,” Ms. Pill told Ms. Treem. “My dad was like, ‘Did you write this yourself?’ and I was like, ‘No.’ There are so many similarities in terms of April’s character and the ways she speaks, the way she knows all the answers.”

Although the plotline, based on the Israeli version of the show, revolves around April’s cancer, Ms. Treem and Ms. Pill do not see this as a cancer drama. To them it is essentially the story of an extremely self-sufficient young woman who has spent so long trying to be a perfect student, a caretaker sister (her brother is autistic) and an undemanding daughter that she cannot easily let herself be scared, needy and sick.

“We both responded strongly to this idea of the perfectly together girl who does not know how to acknowledge that she needs help,” Ms. Treem said. “It just happened to be a time when both of us were realizing for the first time that we were really on our own.”

Ms. Pill said: “We had both recently gone through break-ups, but it was personal and professional. I remember all these discussions we had: Where are the grown-ups?”

Having left home, and Canada, at 18 (with her parents’ blessing), Ms. Pill has technically been on her own a long time. After she was rejected by the only college she applied to — the University of Oxford in Britain — she moved into an East Village apartment with two strangers she met through Craigslist. Unlike most young aspiring actors who move to New York, however, Ms. Pill already had a part waiting for her off Broadway, in Mr. LaBute’s play “The Distance From Here.” Within two years she had made it to Broadway, where her performance as a gun-toting, sexually eager Irish militant in “The Lieutenant of Inishmore” earned her a Tony nomination at 20.

Ms. Pill said that she had, “like April, a vast need for independence, sometimes to my own detriment,” but that she also operated under the watchful eye of an agent and a manager as well as directors and adult actors. “Former child actors are a real weird breed,” she said. “You’re old beyond your years, but there’s also this naïveté about the basics — like I don’t know how to ride a bicycle or drive a car — that keeps you immature.”

Ms. Treem: “We had both started sort of working professionally on a high level but maybe still had this attitude where we expected people to be taking care of us. But at a certain point this is literally not going to happen.”

One night, Ms. Treem said, she went out to dinner with Ms. Pill in Manhattan and began “telling her about stuff I was going through, and I got overwhelmed.” Ms. Pill suggested that they step outside for air, and Ms. Treem, feeling faint, sank to the pavement. Ms. Pill — “Her wisdom exceeds her years,” Ms. Treem said — sat down beside her on a grimy sidewalk in the East Village and calmed her down.

“There are some times when taking care of yourself just feels so exhausting that you want to say, ‘I can’t do it,’ ” Ms. Pill said. “That’s what was so gorgeous about April. She does have that moment of admitting she doesn’t have the capacity.”

For both Ms. Pill and Ms. Treem it was comforting to have a peer on the set of “In Treatment” who was similarly navigating the transition to professional adulthood. Because they were dealing with a young female character so similar to both of them, Ms. Treem and Ms. Pill said, they were accepted as the show’s experts on April. None of their elders understood April’s story line better than they did, which afforded them an authority they might not otherwise have enjoyed, they said.

“It was amazing,” Ms. Pill said. “We were given the freedom to have our ideas, and we were taken so seriously by a bunch of older men. We’d sit around during the read-throughs and be like, ‘I don’t think she would say that.’ ”

Mr. Leight said that the relationship between Ms. Pill and Ms. Treem at times made them “insular” and cryptic. “Ever been with twins?” he said. “Sometimes there’s a private language that develops. My job was to make sure that the audience understood what they were getting at.” He added that they were so interested in April that in some early drafts Mr. Byrne’s Paul, the lead character, “did not get many words in edgewise.”

Ms. Pill acknowledged that she and Ms. Treem were very protective of April: “I remember walking through the hall and one of the electrics saying, ‘That April is such a bitch.’ I was horrified. I was: ‘No, she’s not. Shut up. She may be angry, and that may come across as bitchiness, but that’s way too simple.’ ”

In a rapid-fire back and forth the two women discussed how anger in “so-called perfect women” (to use Ms. Pill’s phrase) makes people uncomfortable. And not just anger: emotions in general. “Emotions are irrational and illegitimate, and you’re not supposed to have them or show them,” Ms. Pill said heatedly — and then laughed at herself.

Not all was that intense on the set of “In Treatment,” which was shot from November to March at the Silvercup Studios in Long Island City, Queens. Often Ms. Pill would send an urgent text message to Ms. Treem (or vice versa) saying, “Meet me at the back bay doors” behind the stage. And there they would hang, talking mostly about their love lives — or lack of love lives, they said.

“Everybody thought we were talking about scripts, but we never were,” Ms. Pill said, and Ms. Treem continued: “We were only ever talking about boys. It was kind of pathetic.”

At this point in the conversation Ms. Treem was summoned back into the writing room at HBO.

“It was good seeing you,” Ms. Pill said, smiling and waving and offering to give her friend a 29th birthday party on her return to New York.

“Drum on,” Ms. Treem said, and her image disappeared from the screen.