[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 "bought" by her family, that life had been made too easy for him by his well-placed father-in-law…. Lonely and wretched in New York, the Nebraska lawyer picks up a little Bronx girl who suffers from ulcers and frequent unemployment. She is a sweet waif, with pathetic ambition as a dancer, sustaining her life through affairs in which she is generous hostess to unworthy males.

The lawyer...