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Why was the blind girl riding the roller coaster? People on the amusement pier in Wildwood, N.J. were wondering about it one sunny day last summer. They watched her clutching her escort's arm during the stomach-wrenching ride; it seemed to freeze her into terrified silence.
A little later at a seaside diner, the same girl was struggling with her dessert. "I can't see," she complained huskily as the melting ice cream slithered from her spoon. "Well, you can feel, can't you?" said her escort. Just within earshot, a waitress hefted her tray with barely controlled anger at the callous young man.
Some hours later, the girl walked into her hotel room. Slowly she took off her dark glasses and peeled heavy strips of adhesive tape from her eyelids. Her night-black eyes blinked in the sudden brightness. "My God," said Actress Anne Bancroft to the fellow actor who had accompanied her. "I never knew this room was so beautiful."
From now on, there would always be the memory of the fear she experienced during her experiment with blindness. After weeks of work, Actress Bancroft was beginning to understand that last dimension of the role for which she was preparing. Already a part of her was onstage, creating with incredible vitality a superior human being: half-blind Anne Sullivan, whose stubborn skill lit up life itself for a deaf, blind and mute child named Helen Keller. Already, Anne Bancroft was The Miracle Worker of Playwright William Gibson's impressive new play (TIME, Nov. 2).
Beginning of an Era. Even for the vast and vocal audience that recognized the Bancroft talent two years ago in Gibson's Two for the Seesaw, this season's Bancroft is a stunning spectacle. As Gittel Mosca, the heartbroken Bronx-to-Bohemia hoyden of Seesaw, the young star still had an uncertain luster. There was a feeling that perhaps the black-stockinged beatnik was only playing herself. What would happen if she really had to act?
With her second Broadway role, Anne Bancroft has given her answer—and upstaged her contemporaries. At the summit of the American theater, Julie Harris, Geraldine Page and Kim Stanley have a brilliant new competitor. Such names as Hayes, Cornell and Fontanne ring distant on the ear—echoes from another generation. "We've come to the end of gracious ladies in the theater," says Producer Harold S. (Fiorello!) Prince. "Why, I don't know. But this girl Bancroft is the greatest there is. She marks the beginning of an era."
Somehow, the fresh and volatile Bancroft talent carries extra surprise, for the brief Bancroft career is a thunderous theatrical cliche. Even the name is a typical Hollywood banality: 28 years ago when she was born, Anne Bancroft was Anna Maria Italiano. She was the kid who scribbled on the back wall of her apartment house, "I want to be an actress," and who kept showing off for the handsome stranger whom she took to be a
Hollywood producer—until she discovered that he drove an ice truck.