Night Over Taos. Night of a Mexican Freedom Fighter – Theater Review – New York Times

““We are out of fashion,” says one of the last freedom fighters in Taos, N.M., in 1847, and although he is talking about his troops’ outdated muskets, he might as well be referring to the plays of Maxwell Anderson. “Night Over Taos,” one of Anderson’s lesser-known works, was first staged by the Group Theater in 1932. This revival, directed by Estelle Parsons with great devotion to the play, both captures the socially relevant style of ’30s theater and demonstrates why Anderson now seems so plodding and preachy.

The play is set during one night, among rebels fighting hopelessly to prevent Taos from being absorbed into the United States, as the rest of New Mexico had been. Anderson depicts the imperialism of the Americans and the patriarchal culture of the Mexicans, but the play soon becomes a study of the tyrannical control of Pablo Montoya, the rebel leader with a soap opera problem: His two sons are in love with his two women, the older with the one he is about to ditch, and the younger with the one he is about to marry.”

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