Being dramatists first and reformers second, Peter Viertel and Irwin Shaw have written a rattling good play with a meaning. It is "The Survivors."… The authors are demonstrating the futility of killing. But instead of presenting it as a political argument, they have embodied it in a rousing gun drama laid in Missouri after the Civil War….
["The Survivors" begins to get down to the core of its thesis when] Steve, hesitating between principle and tradition, has to listen to the bitter arguments from both sides….
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