["Bury the Dead"] is based on a conceit of originality and power. Six men just laid in their new dug graves by a weary detachment of fellow-soldiers rise slowly to their feet and with quiet persistence refuse to submit to the final indignity—dirt on their faces. They are dead all right. There is no doubt about that. But they won't be buried and they won't lie still no matter how anxious the living may be to have them covered, and forgotten, and quiet at last.

The men ordered to bury the rebellious corpses are struck with terror. So, too, are the captain who comes to investigate, the general who appeals to their sense of duty, and the six women who are brought as a last resort to give their various reasons why the dead, once they are dead, should cease from troubling those living to whom alone the earth belongs. But terrified though they all are, they are not really surprised. Something of the sort, they knew, was bound to happen. Too many people have been killed and too many have been buried. Earth herself has rebelled. She will not receive any more of her children dead before their time, and dead men will submit no longer even to death itself. One of the six has a vision of a better world. The other five merely know that they have never seen nor heard nor felt what they were destined to see and to hear and to feel. They are dead and it can't be helped. But the living must not be permitted to forget them or to suppose that they found it sweet and proper to die. "De profundis clamavi."

If only the play as a whole were as original and arresting as this central conceit, if only the author's macabre imagination had sustained him to the end, then "Bury the Dead" would be as impressive a work as its many enthusiastic admirers have already proclaimed it to be. Even as it stands it is incomparably the best of the left-wing dramas seen this year, and the unknown author, one Irwin Shaw, quite legitimately inspires hopes at least as high as those aroused by Mr. Odets when he was known only as the author of "Waiting for Lefty." Indeed, "Bury the Dead" is much less merely a journalistic tour de force than the latter piece, but the unfortunate fact nevertheless remains that the first twenty minutes of Mr. Shaw's play are the best twenty minutes of the evening and that the writing goes steadily downhill as the symbol is developed in more and more obvious directions.

It is not that the author is not capable of powerful and genuinely dramatic presentation. The solid matter-of-factness of the opening scenes is, for example, right. So, too, are the grotesque grave-digger humor of the private soldiers and the whole air of inevitability about the miracle once it has occurred. Moreover, in these earlier scenes the translation of the idea into concrete terms is fully achieved. No explanations or interpretations are given and none are needed. The symbol and its meaning are not two things but one—which is another way of saying that allegory has ceased to be allegory and become poetry instead. (pp. 592-93)

I am not blaming him as a playwright for not agreeing with me that there is not much hope of avoiding war until it is generally realized that torn faces and bloody guts are neither dulce nor decorum even though they happen to be the byproducts of the newest conviction that a way to end war has been discovered at last. But I do blame him as a playwright for not discovering some way of presenting his amendment in terms as truly dramatic and as truly poetic as he found for the original proposition. A good play is not improved by the addition of supplementary discourses however fiery or however true. A symbol as complete and adequate as the one he invented is not improved by being progressively diluted with explicit interpretations. (p. 593)