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Dewey Roberts (Frank M. Thomas Jr.), a high-strung seventh-grade schoolboy, lives in the Midwest but has a burning love of boats and the sea. He adores his young teacher (Francesca Burning) because she hails from New Bedford, knows what a jibboom is, encourages his enthusiasm. When Dewey finds her kissing the athletic coach, whom he also idolizes, he is heartbroken, persuades his bumbling father (Frank M. Thomas Sr.) to send him to boarding school. Twenty years later Dewey, now an extremely important personage in the shipping industry encounters the teacher, dowdy and myopic, in a Washington hotel, is tempted to take her to dinner, buys her a bunch of violets instead.
Winterset (by Maxwell Anderson: Guthne McClintic, producer). Playwright Anderson makes a practice of reworking old themes. His notion that a nation deserves the Government it gets was put to prose in Both Your Houses which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1933; put to poetry in Valley Forge, which won him a critical A for Effort. In 1928 Playwright Anderson became agitated about the Sacco-Vanzetti case, collaborated with Harold Hickerson on an indignant defense of the accused called Gods of the Lightning. With that celebrated cause still in mind, Mr. Anderson has now fashioned Winterset.
Designer Jo Mielziner scores one game toward an artistic rubber for Winterset the moment the curtain rises. 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 Anderson's people go furtively about their sinister business. With classic disregard for the laws 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 apposite East Side Juliet.
Critical laurels by the bushel went to tense young Actor Meredith and his partner Margo, whom Filmen Ben Hecht & Charles MacArthur retrieved from a Manhattan cabaret last year for their Crime Without Passion. For his many scenes of undoubted power and beauty, Playwright Anderson was credited with having at least provided a theatrical experience not to be missed by those who take the U. S. Theatre seriously.