Two for the Seesaw is a prime example of the type of playwriting and production that prevails with metropolitan audiences by clever accommodation to their standards of taste, interest, and value. It is clever rather than profound playwriting but it also exudes an air of wisdom, kindliness and truth of character that makes friends at the box office…. Interest never flags in this comedy of sentiment until we are being prepared for the anticlimactic resolution. The continuously moving action, varied wit...

William Gibson's The Seesaw Log … is a blow-by-blow, cut-by-cut account of an ordeal that occupied two years of the author's life and left him, at the end, financially enriched and spiritually depleted. In short, it is a success story. At the same time it is a study of defeat. In the course of a hundred and forty pages, the rugged-individualist theory of art, which regards the author's intentions as sacrosanct, is eroded and finally overwhelmed by the rugged collectivism of an in...

[Two for the Seesaw] is one of those simple, pleasant plays that obviously belong in the theatre, since they are almost always highly popular. They are the bestsellers of the contemporary stage. No one should cavil at their success. But, I confess with some reluctance, they interest me very little. The play's sentimental subject holds the seed of a serious theme: this makes it "respectable." A lawyer from Omaha has left his wife because he harbors the feeling that he had been "bo...

Although William Gibson has only two characters in "Two for the Seesaw" he has a tender style of writing and a beautiful little story to tell…. When the curtain goes up, "Two for the Seesaw" looks like a plausible stunt. A man in a shabby room in one corner of New York is telephoning to a girl who lives in a cheap apartment decorated with a dressmaker's form and earnest art objects. In the first scene we seem to be promised one more whirl at the epic theme of two un...

[In "Two for the Seesaw," author] William Gibson has a deft, buoyant, rapid-fire flair for dialogue, he is perfectly able to keep an evening moving in spite of all the telephoning and his eye for accurately-observed detail is excellent. What he hasn't quite mastered at the moment … is the business of sustaining a psychology, a troubled and uncertain state of mind, through all of its possible dramatic complexities. [Jerry Ryan meets Gittel Mosca] while he is in the process of divo...