Word: wouk
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Traitor (by Herman Wouk; produced by Jed Harris) turns something very much in the news into something very much of the theater. It concerns Professor Allen Carr (Wesley Addy), a brilliant young atomic scientist who feels that the only hope for peace is for the U.S. to share its atomic secrets with the U.S.S.R. Then, reasons the professor, war would prove annihilating for both sides. Carr has begun to pass information along to Communist agents when a U.S. Naval Intelligence squad catches him redhanded. Instead of arresting him as a traitor, they successfully appeal to him as a patriot...
...Traitor has its serious side: there is some intelligent discussion, and even, in the person of Walter Hampden, a probing professor of philosophy. But as it proceeds, the play becomes more & more a stock thriller, until the tricks of the traitors become indistinguishable from tricks of the trade. Playwright Wouk does little to plumb the presumably complex mind of his young scientist. After giving every indication that Carr is to be the center of a serious drama, the author makes him little more than an instrument of the plot...