As drama, The Miracle Worker is a battle of wills, and it’s being fiercely duked out (though not Patty Duked out) at the Lyric Stage Company of Boston. The play, a 1959 Broadway hit that became a 1962 film, is a little clunky. At its center, though, is the power of the struggle between not-yet-seven-year-old Helen Keller, blind, deaf, and mute, and the young Annie Sullivan, who was brought to Reconstruction Alabama from the Yankee Irish wilds to be her teacher.

The Miracle Worker is not the best-written play in the world. There really isn’t room in the drama to develop the Keller family, but Gibson tries. And the play is further encumbered by voiceover flashbacks intended to explain Sullivan’s toughness and reluctance to love her charge. The drama’s initial success was credited in large part to the firecracker performances of Patty Duke and Anne Bancroft, both of whom won Oscars for the roles they reprised in the film. Despite its name recognition, the play is not often professionally revived — probably because child actors capable of playing Helen do not grow on trees. The Lyric has found a strong trunk to kick, though, and Eliza Rose Fichter, daughter of Underground Railway Theater’s Debra Wise and something of a theater veteran for a sixth-grader, has fallen into its lap. Her more fragile Helen and Julie Jirousek’s four-square, emotion-tugged Annie may not erase the memory of the Duke-Bancroft fisticuffs, but their rendering of the fight, if less brutal, is nonetheless convincing. And the play’s famous payoff at the pump — when Helen finally connects a word to a thing and is off and learning — remains thrilling.

One caveat: in his program note artistic director Spiro Veloudos (who chose the play, though Courtney O’Connor capably directs it) expresses his shock that many young people don’t know who Helen Keller is. Yet the program doesn’t include any information about the woman The Miracle Worker leaves at the crucial beginning of an extraordinary journey that took her to Radcliffe College and then on to considerable fame as an author, lecturer, and advocate, particularly for the American Foundation for the Blind. (Playwright Gibson wrote a sequel to The Miracle Worker, the 1982 Monday After the Miracle, which deals less with Keller’s accomplishments than with the triangle comprising her, Sullivan, and John Macy, who was her editor and her teacher’s husband.)

But in the 1887-set The Miracle Worker, Helen, rendered blind and deaf at 19 months, is the untamed, " afflicted " child of a Confederate captain turned publisher and his younger second wife. When she becomes a bigger handful than they or the standard African-American retainer can keep in their grip and medical hopes prove fruitless, a governess is sought. Inexperienced 20-year-old Annie Sullivan, rescued from a Dickensian childhood and surgically correctable blindness by Boston’s Perkins School for the Blind, gets the nod for what turns out to be a lifetime position. But as depicted in the play, it’s touch-and-go at first, as Annie walks a thin line between bringing Helen to heel and breaking the obviously quick-minded child’s spirit.

At the same time that the play is a wrenching scuffle, it is also a paean to the power of language. Annie, armed with the manual alphabet that was the deaf currency of the day, is determined to bestow the gift of digital gab on Helen if it kills both of them. On another level, as playwright Gibson points out, the play — which he insists is about Sullivan, not Keller — is " a parable of the artist’s struggle with his or her raw material: they rescue each other. "

At the Lyric, Andrew Stuart supplies a somewhat awkward set with several levels for Fichter’s groping Helen to negotiate and a veritable cranny for Annie’s bedroom. Among the supporting cast, Bill Humphreys is an aptly sputtering, posturing Captain Keller, and Sarah Newhouse, though her Southern accent meanders toward New York, quietly conveys mother Kate’s bewildered, indulgent love. But The Miracle Worker belongs to its chief combatants. Here Jirousek (who looks a bit like Sullivan) is saucy, solid, stubborn, and impassioned — not to mention good at heavy lifting and dodging flung scrambled egg. And Fichter, less feral than Patty Duke, brings to Helen a delicate quality that contrasts with her dogged, leg-kicking defiance. She gives an impressively concentrated performance, her hands frantically working to communicate, her eyes and ears betraying little sign they’re working. May she not grow up to star in Valley of the Dolls.