The Theatre: New Play in Manhattan: Mar. 23, 1936

Case of Clyde Griffiths (by Erwin Piscator & Lena Goldschmidt; Group Theatre & Milton Shubert, producers). Thirty years ago an errant youth of Cortland, N.Y. named Chester Gillette took his sweetheart, Grace Brown, out in a rowboat, drowned her because Grace was pregnant and Chester wanted to marry a rich girl. For a generation Chester Gillette's crime and punishment were forgotten by the outside world until Theodore Dreiser exhumed the case, wrote a wordy but exhaustive novel about it called An American Tragedy. Since 1926 the Dreiser story of "Clyde Griffiths' " downfall...