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Patty's voice is almost as versatile as Anne's; she supplied the young boy's tones for Playwright Gibson's recorded offstage "voices." Although she turns 13 this week—notwithstanding the pressagentry that kept her ten years old for three years—Patty backstage is still often the grade-school child, an inveterate lap sitter. Onstage she is a polished professional who can think on her feet. Once, when a set door stuck and Anne Bancroft swore helplessly under her breath, Patty promptly began making her "noises," the grunts of the speechless, to cover Anne's indiscretion. When Anne finally whispered, "I'm going to shove you out the window," Patty made the drop and managed to make her way to her stage mother on cue.
Bronx to Broadway. The approaching maturity which Patty—and her agent—would dearly love to delay, is exactly what her backstage friend Anne Bancroft has been hunting down for years. At 28, Anne has progressed from The Bronx to Broadway, where the people she portrays still seem more meaningful and manageable than Anne Bancroft herself.
She is a wealthy woman now, with a $150,000-a-year income, but she gets only a $50-a-week allowance from her business manager. When she does not cook aftertheater snacks for herself, she relies on what Mamma sends down from Yonkers, where the Italianos now live. She owns Manhattan real estate, has an interest in a California bank and a Texas oil well, but she keeps warm by huddling in the kitchen of her Greenwich Village apartment, with both stove and oven going full blast.
"I'm still an ignorant slob," she insists with a belligerence that suggests she intends to remain just that. But she strives mightily to make herself over, with psychiatry, acting lessons, voice lessons (she hopes to do a musical next). Twice a week she still goes to Manhattan's Institute for Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation to work with blind disturbed children. It seems almost by design that she has little time left for dates, except for her platonic friendship with the Three Bears—the fatherly trio of Penn, Coe and Gibson—and with a couple of boys from the Actors' Studio.
Anne keeps talking of marriage, but when she told her psychiatrist not long ago that she had put a piece of a friend's wedding cake under her pillow, he answered ironically: "At last you're taking active steps." Says she: "I don't know why, but I can't make a mature relationship based on trust, respect and recognition." She adds: "Most of Annie Sullivan is myself. It's my own blindness I draw on, my unawareness of myself."
Perhaps more revealing than this sort of couch talk are some lines that Playwright William Gibson wrote into Seesaw while the show was trying out on the road. The middleaged, Midwestern lawyer tells Gittel: "I said [you are] a beautiful girl; I didn't mean skin-deep—there you're a delight. Anyone can see. And underneath is a street brawler. That some can see. But under the street brawler is something as fresh and crazy and timid as a colt." And that, right now, is probably as good a description of Anna Maria Italiano as can be found.