Winterset, a 1935 play by American playwright Maxwell Anderson, is a love story about star-crossed lovers, a family story about a father protecting his son, and a crime story with gangsters and murderers. But the characters who dramatize Anderson's poetry are mainly tools to the play's ideas..

With the memory of the scandalous Sacco-Vanzetti case still stuck in his craw, Anderson wrote a drama that deals with justice not done, the hopelessness of poverty, fear of the new, man's eternal struggle to do the right thing, and the redemption of one's soul. (In case you're not familiar with the case:: Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were Italian immigrants and anarchists who were arrested, tried, convicted and hanged for a robbery and murder they did not commit, in 1927. This travesty of justice which entailed corruption from the police all the way to the judge was prompted by prejudice against the newly-minted Americans).

The play opens under the Manhattan Bridge where we learn that Trock, a murderer, killed a man but was never apprehended. An innocent Italian immigrant, Romagna, was tried, convicted, and executed instead. Trock's gangster crony, Garth, was involved in that murder, and now that some professor has reopened the case, and is re-examining the evidence, Trock is afraid Garth will finger him. The investigation sets in motion a chain of events that eventually leads to the noble human goals of understanding and enlightenment, but it does so at a very high price for Garth's entire family.

Garth lives with his father, Esdras, a poor rabbi with a Talmudic bent, and his sister, Miriamne, in a tenement under the same bridge. Esdras knows, yet doesn't know, that Garth was culpable; he has spent years protecting him with a lie, but the protection only served to mask the insistent rotting of both their souls. After all, he eventually asks, what else could a father do?

Into all this comes Mio, Romagna's son, looking, like Electra, to avenge his father. He meets Miriamne, unaware that her brother's testimony could have saved his father. The two fall in love and vow to build a life together. But the hopelessness of their hopes soon becomes apparent when the truth is revealed.

All the action comes to a climax when Judge Gaunt enters the scene, not knowing where he is, why he's there, or what he wants. He is old and tormented, with a sick soul; it was Gaunt who was responsible for sending Mio's father to the hangman with the knowledge that the man was innocent.

Winterset is a grim story with no relief save for a few humorously spoken lines by Gaunt. While the graceful blank verse is appropriate for the exploration of ideas the play generally is curiously uninvolving.

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Synopsis from:  http://www.curtainup.com/winterse.html