Valley Forge

Valley Forge (1934), a play by Maxwell Anderson. [Guild Theatre, 58 perf.] George Washington (Philip Merivale) has grown short‐tempered watching his men starve and die in the cruel winter at Valley Forge and receiving no real aid from a narrow‐minded, greedy Congress. When his old sweetheart, Mary Philipse (Margalo Gillmore), braves the storms to visit him, he agrees to a meeting with British General Howe (Reginald Mason) to arrange for a surrender. But when Howe arrives, Washington recognizes that the bravery of his own men demands he fight to the finish. Supposedly written after several critics had complained that Anderson was more interested in English Elizabethan history than in his own, the play won generally laudatory notices, but the Theatre Guild production could not find a public. Its imaginary meeting of Washington and Howe paralleled a similarly fictitious meeting of Mary and Elizabeth in Anderson's Mary of Scotland.