Winterset

Winterset (1935), a play by Maxwell Anderson. [Martin Beck Theatre, 195 perf.; NYDCC Award.] Mio (Burgess Meredith) is certain that his anarchist father, Bartolomeo, was unjustly sentenced to death for the murder of a paymaster. He visits Judge Gaunt (Richard Bennett), who presided over the trial, but recognizes that the jurist has become mentally deranged. Mio concludes that his best hope for bringing the truth to light is Miriamne (Margo), whose brother witnessed the crime. Mio and Miriamne fall in love, and when the gangsters who were the real culprits kill Mio, she threatens to reveal the truth, and she, too, is killed. Gilbert W. Gabriel exemplified the generally enthusiastic response to this blank‐verse play when he wrote in the American, “It is, to date, Anderson's masterpiece. This, underneath all its full‐flower eloquence, is melodrama, right, tight, trig melodrama, and immensely exciting melodrama, too.” One of the most memorable aspects of the Guthrie McClintic production was Jo Mielziner's stunning scenery, in particular a street scene overshadowed by the Brooklyn Bridge. The play was Anderson's second attempt to dramatize the Sacco‐Vanzetti story. His earlier collaboration with Harold Hickerson, Gods of the Lightning (1928), had failed.

Maxwell Anderson
1935

Maxwell Anderson's Winterset (1935) is one of the most important verse dramas, or plays written largely in poetry, in the twentieth century. Produced on New York City's Broadway at the height of the Great Depression, Anderson's play is a striking tragedy that deals indirectly with the famous Sacco-Vanzetti case, in which two Italian immigrants with radical political beliefs were executed. With its combination of "low" prose and "high" poetic verse, which enables it to be sharply realistic while simultaneously commenting on universal philosophical themes, Winterset is widely considered Anderson's best verse drama. Its ambitious political and philosophical agenda, as well as its elegant poetry, earned Anderson the Drama Critics' Circle Award of 1936. The style of Winterset has inspired many critics to compare the play to a Shakespearean tragedy.

The plot of Winterset follows Mio Romagna's quest to prove his father's innocence in the years after Bartolomeo Romagna was executed for a robbery and murder he did not commit. This quest is complicated by Mio's newfound love for Miriamne Esdras and the difficult ethical decisions that result from his connection with her family. A challenging political play, with philosophical meditations on faith, truth, justice, love and duty, Winterset not only alludes to Shakespearean and Judaic philosophy; it develops a profound moral system of its own. Available in individual editions such as that published by Anderson House in 1935, Winterset is a landmark in American drama universalized by its superbly crafted poetry and its profound philosophical assertions.