"Silent Night, Lonely Night" is touching, gentle, sensitive and very, very wistful. Robert Anderson's new play … contemplates the brief encounter of two tormented and unhappy young people in a New England inn on Christmas Eve with tender and rueful understanding…. But it seems to me that its forlorn mood of wistfulness has the misfortune to grow so monotonous that the eventual effect is far more trying than moving….

The sad, short, tender relationship between the pair, which is based on mutual loneliness and compassion, is presented with delicacy and sympathy, but the monotony does creep in, and the one note on which the narrative is based becomes as wearying as it is undramatic. Unrelieved wistfulness can go only so far in theater, and I'm afraid the bounds are soon exceeded in Mr. Anderson's play. The tenderness becomes cloying, and not even the addition of such minor characters as...