Polishing Treason's Image

A form of moral pollution has seeped into the drama in recent years. It has adopted the totalitarian tactic of rewriting history. The latest entry is Inquest, a turgid, shrill and sob-sisterish courtroom polemic that glorifies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as homey, humanity-loving innocents hounded to the electric chair by "political terror."

The Rosenbergs were convicted on March 29, 1951, of conspiracy to commit espionage in connection with supplying atomic-bomb data to the Russians. In the next 26 months, there were at least 14 appeals and reviews of their case. Justice may be blind once. It is not likely to be blind that often. Playwright Donald Freed makes the Rosenbergs appear like harmless and bewildered children made to pay with their lives merely for playing with a red toy balloon called Communism.

Using film stills projected against the rear of the stage, Playwright Freed tries to imply that the Rosenbergs were victims of McCarthyite hysteria. On screen, McCarthy slavers venom, J. Edgar Hoover utters bulldog banalities, and Eisenhower grins over his golf strokes. Such slanted juxtapositions are peripheral to the Rosenberg trial. The prevailing climate of opinion was determined by the cold war. The threat was real and direct: open Soviet attempts to make the Iron Curtain an iron shroud of tyranny over all of free Western Europe.

Anne Jackson and George Grizzard make the Rosenbergs a loving and appealing couple and devoted parents of the two young sons who are to be orphaned. Unconscionably and irresponsibly, the play trades on the emotions of the large New York Jewish theatergoing audience by implying that the Rosenbergs were racial martyrs in a kind of minipogrom.

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