SOURCE: Orlin, Lena Cowen. “Night over Taos: Maxwell Anderson's Sources and Artistry.” North Dakota Quarterly 48, no. 3 (summer 1980): 12-25.

In the following essay, Orlin traces Anderson's source material for Night over Taos and defends the play against earlier criticism.

The Group Theatre premiered Maxwell Anderson's Night Over Taos during its first season, in March of 1932. In his “Story of the Group Theatre and the Thirties,” The Fervent Years, Group cofounder Harold Clurman remembered that his immediate impression of the script was “not a happy one. The play seemed bookish, contrived, uninspired. I was reluctant to have the Group do it.”¹ Although he finally decided that it would suffice as a “playable stage piece,” his lack of enthusiasm for Night Over Taos proved characteristic of subsequent reactions to the play. The Group production closed after only two weeks. Its director, Lee Strasberg, admitted that the “contemplative, cloistral tone” he established...