Things are often said to be just like Greek tragedies, but "Winterset" really is. One vast web of highly improbable coincidence is woven so elaborately and so ingeniously that terrified suspense bangs on the turn of each ironical development. Ghastly irony is this drama's most lethal weapon, and it is called into play so effectively and so frequently that the unhappy spectator is harrowed sick. A forlorn halfwit, for example, driven out of his warm shelter by the gangster villain, picks up a cigarette butt discarded by that villain, and by lighting it unconsciously gives a signal that draws fire from the villain's underling and thereby kills the villain.

The story is Laid in the present and is unraveled in some typically dismal parts of New York. Despite these forces working for realism, the drama is as unrealistic as "Oedipus the King," and for the same reasons. People do not collide as might be expected, but rather as a violent artist, never transgressing of course the laws of possibility, demands in the interests of tragedy. At the beginning of "Winterset," a Christ-like radical is shown being condemned by a judge to die for a murder which he did not do, with his infant son in the room, and the three guilty men near at hand. Sixteen years later, by very little more than chance, these strange associates are ironically reunited: the son, a young man inspired by the conviction of his father's innocence and depraved by the lust for revenge; the judge, driven periodically mad by flitting shadows of remorse; and the three guilty men, one the brother of the young man's sweetheart, another a tubercular killer, and the third a bloody, slimy, bullet-pierced specter. The cataclysm that follows is as staggering as so highly explosive material permits.

Over-alert social critics are apt to notice leftist leanings in the play, such as a Communist's being sent to death by mob hysteria, and a policeman's bullying the poor. These suggestions, if not completely illusory, are at best irrelevant and insignificant.

As complete an ignorance of Maxwell Anderson's play has been assumed in the reader as exists in the reviewer. But if the play has suffered in the transcription, it must have been too powerful in the original for anybody's good. The acting has not suffered in the change, because the actors have not been changed. Burgess, Meredith and Margo, we humbly submit. Warrant no comment.