Winterset

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Winterset, verse play by Maxwell Anderson, produced and published in 1935. Its theme was suggested by the Sacco‐Vanzetti case.

Thirteen years before the time of the play, Romagna, an Italian radical, was “framed” on a murder charge and executed. His wife died, and their son Mio, wandering through the country as a tramp, becomes passionately certain of his father's innocence. He comes to a New York tenement district, where in a mean dwelling under a bridge he locates Garth Esdras, a reformed gangster who has come home in an attempt to escape the domination of Trock, the gangster leader who actually committed the murder of which Romagna was convicted. Mio meets Garth's sister Miriamne, and they fall in love, finding an intimate bond in their mutual loneliness and terror. Then, in the Esdras cellar apartment, he discovers Garth with Judge Gaunt, who participated in the Romagna “frame‐up,” and whose sense of guilt has driven him mad. The judge is being nursed by Garth's father, a kindly and wise old rabbi. When Garth and Gaunt deny Mio's accusations, he begins to doubt his father's innocence, until Trock is shocked into confession by the reappearance of his gunman, Shadow, whom he thought he had murdered. Police take the insane Gaunt into custody, but after Miriamne prevents Mio from accusing Trock, the gangster and his men surround the tenement when the officers leave. Trock shoots Mio and as he dies Miriamne assures him that she will carry his message to the world, but she too is killed.

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.