Winterset, by Maxwell Anderson

It’s not too surprising that this play won awards when it was written and first performed, as this play appears to be precisely the sort of play that was and remains award bait as a drama.  The play is a tragedy, it has a heavily Jewish cast of characters and strongly political themes, and it allows the reader or viewer to engage in virtue signalling by supporting an underdog and feeling a sense of outrage at the perceived injustices of American society.  The original writing and performance of the play in the 1930’s, during a period of particularly strong socialist and Communist influence in the United States, is the sort of approach that one would imagine being popular among contemporary voters of the Tony Awards and Drama Circle Awards and related awards shows.  And while this play’s political sense and my own are quite different and even hostile, and the playwright’s approach altogether too mawkishly sentimental for my own tastes, it is not as if this play is a terrible one either.  It certainly manages to convey certain aspects of violence well and has a complex view of its characters that prevents the play from being merely propaganda for all its serious flaws.

In terms of its structure, this play somewhat unconventionally has a three act structure.  Most of the time, in dramas we are used to two act structures while the three act structure is more noted for screenplays, which is perhaps the reason why the author is best known as the writer whose work became films like Key Largo.  Indeed, this play is very cinematic in terms of its approach, well suited to film adaptation.  In the first act, we see Trock, a violent hoodlum, bully those who witnessed a crime they were all apart of in the fear that justice will catch up to him, and we see a judge whose opinion of his own rectitude and his involvement in the original murder trial that condemned an “innocent” political radical (although there is no such thing in reality), with a cliffhanger ending.  In the second act, we see a mock trial of sorts where the son of the dead radical seeks to condemn the Trock and finds himself falling in love mutually with the sister of one of Trock’s accomplices, who is himself the son of an elderly and not particularly ethical Jewish man.  The third act then ends tragically with (spoiler alert) both the idealistic young man and his beloved young woman dead as a result of Truck’s submachine gun violence.

It is obvious why this play was regarded so highly upon its release and only mysterious why it hasn’t been revived often and successfully to those of the author’s ilk who still love this sort of material.  The play is sentimental, featuring doomed love, people caught in ethical dilemmas, violence, social critique, sympathetic portrayals of liberal Judaism, and the ability of leftist audiences to relish in their self-hatred of American society.  On most of those grounds there are plenty of reasons for me to dislike a drama like this, and while I do, I must at least admit that the play is well-constructed and the author certainly knows what he is about.  If that makes this play better or worse than it would be incompetently done, I will leave for the reader to judge for themselves.  I certainly would not write a play like this one myself, nor would I pay money to watch a play like this one, nor would I be remiss in finding excuses not to see it if I was invited to see it for free, but there is an audience for this sort of thing even now.