Two for the Seesaw (play)

Two for the Seesaw is a 1958 play written by William Gibson. The original Broadway production ran for 750 performances. It had a cast of two, Henry Fonda and Anne Bancroft.[1] It was adapted into a film of the same name in 1962, the musical Seesaw in 1973.

The play was somewhat of a surprise hit. It marked the Broadway debut of writer William Gibson, who would later also collaborate with director Arthur Penn on the very successful play and film of The Miracle Worker, which also featured Anne Bancroft in the lead.

This play also marked Anne Bancroft’s very successful Broadway debut. In « The Seesaw Log, » Gibson’s prose account of the vicissitudes of bringing the play along from its inception through its out-of-town tryouts, Gibson recounts the challenges in accommodating the man’s role to suit the standards of Fonda, the play’s star, without whose commercial marketability the show would never have been financed, and of what it took to balance a three-act tragicomic romance. The book also speaks to Gibson’s increasing frustrations with writing and rewriting to please an audience and his production team, as well as what seemed, for Gibson, the achingly hollow victory of the play’s terrific commercial success. It also recounts the thrill of discovering and casting Anne Bancroft in what was her star-making role as the coarse, ethnic (Jewish) Gittel Mosca, with her irresistible gamine charm and her enormous emotional range, warmth, and wit.

It’s got three acts, only two onstage characters, the combined set of his and hers New York apartments, two onstage telephones, and the offstage character of the man’s estranged Mid-Western wife to whom he may or may not return.