New Play in Manhattan

Two for the Seesaw (by William Gibson) needs only two for the cast. Henry Fonda is an Omaha lawyer, downhearted and adrift in New York while being divorced. Anne Bancroft is a warmhearted, racy-tongued, Bronx-to-Bohemia floater whom he meets at a party. All her life she has given too freely; he all his life has taken. Shuttling between their shabby little flats, they carry on a love affair in sickness and in health, in banter and in woe, bridging a cultural and temperamental divide better than they can blot out a memory of marriage.

Though makeshift and spotty, the play is not just one more movie-soppy, movie-safe bit of lonely hearts and flowers, or just one more cleverish game of theatrical double-dummy stage writing. It has its quite funny and its reasonably touching scenes, some nice dialogue, flashes of real theater, touches of real feeling. But it mingles thematic movement with technical bar-chinning, the capacities of an author with the commonplaces of a situation. And though it does not falsify its ending, it oversentimentalizes it. As a two-character piece, it has wasted moments and overworked effects, more changes of scene than of story, and two telephones that are almost a liaison in themselves.

Beyond bringing a rather promising playwright to Broadway, Two for the Seesaw brings a remarkably appealing actress. TV's Anne Bancroft has an urgently personal quality and unmistakable comic gifts. Allotted a distinctive lingo and some catchy lines, she wonderfully brightens her early scenes with a blend of Bohemian bluntness and Bronx cheer. But she can manage emotion too, and inner perception, and suffering she wants to conceal. In a far weaker part--being virtually a straight man in comedy scenes, and a rather literary talker in serious ones--Actor Fonda can only, very often, be adroitly dull.

Like Gittel Mosca, the girl she plays in Two for the Seesaw, Actress Anne Bancroft speaks pure Bronxese with expansive gestures to match. Like Gittel, she likes bulky sweaters, long black stockings and flat shoes. With this background, she needed just one reading to win the part from Producer Fred Coe. Says Director Arthur Penn: "She didn't even read for me--I was sold on sight. She is Gittel."

Born in The Bronx 26 years ago, Anne (original name: Anna Italiano) grew up into a dark-eyed, black-haired girl with a craving for stagecraft. "I always wanted to get up in front of people and do something," she says. "When I was a little kid, I used to go up to the WPA workers in the street and ask if they'd like me to sing." After a session at the American Academy, she broke into television at 18, played leading roles for two seasons (Studio One, Kraft Theater], then put in a weary tour in Hollywood acting in second-rate films (New York Confidential, The Naked Street). Last August she went back to Manhattan to study acting with Drama Coach Herbert Berghof--and to find sudden fame on Broadway.

Like a method player, Actress Bancroft, who has gone through marriage and a divorce, uses her entire life to help create the character of Gittel, admits "everything about her comes from me." Says Director Penn: "We've been hoping that Annie would get good notices, and now that she has, we feel like proud parents." Anne shrugs off her success: "I'm happy for us, for this family--Coe and Gibson and Penn. It's for them I'm happy about the notices. I knew about me."

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