(October 7, 1935)

Up from the shadowy dead-end of a Manhattan slum street rises a pylon of Brooklyn Bridge, the span sweeping out of sight high overhead with a sparse twinkle of lights. Beneath this dark serenity Playwright Maxwell Anderson's people in the play, Winterset, go furtively about their sinister business. With classic disregard for law of probability, almost everyone concerned in a 15-year old payroll robbery for which a celebrated radical was wrongly executed, come together. There is Trock, the consumptive killer who engineered the crime, just out of prison for another misdeed. There is the judge (Richard Bennett), out of his wits with brooding upon the injustice he fears has been done. There is Garth, who saw the robbery committed and might have saved the condemned man had he but spoken. There is the radical's tough and tortured young son Mio (Burgess Meredith), relentlessly set upon clearing his father's name.

Playwright Anderson, whose simple maxim is that "somebody must write verse plays," has clothed his piece intentionally as well as unintentionally in an uneven variety of poetic fabric. Much of the common street speech of his criminals and vagrants is good stout tow-sacking. Much of the overlong excursion into the philosophy of justice, to judge by audience reaction, is tiresome shoddy. But pure chamfered silk, most observers agreed, were the tender, spontaneous love passages between Mio and Miriamne (Margo), Garth's mercurial younger sister, a curious and strangely opposite East Side Juliet.