SOURCE: "Murder Most Foul," in The New Yorker, Vol. LXII, No. 5, 24 March 1986, p. 108.

In this review of the Broadway production of Execution of Justice, Gill finds the play incoherent, but he reserves his harshest censure for the bleak set design.

The number of cross-purposes at work in a failed melodrama called Execution of Justice, at the Virginia Theatre, is made manifest by its setting. Ming Cho Lee, ordinarily one of the most gifted and resourceful of our set designers, has been asked to provide a courtroom—specifically, a courtroom in San Francisco, in which we are to observe the trial of Dan White, the former city employee who, in 1978, shot and killed the mayor of San Francisco, George Moscone, and Harvey Milk, a city supervisor, who was a leading member of the homosexual community in San Francisco. The melodrama is made up of transcripts of testimony given at...