SOURCE: A review of The Plough and the Stars, in The Saturday Review of Literature, Vol. IV, No. 20, December 10, 1927, p. 427.

In the following review of the American premiere of The Plough and the Stars, Sayler addresses the emotional appeal of the play, noting that the production's general disregard for verisimilitude accented its humanistic concerns.

One of the most difficult tasks the theatre confronts in making dramatic literature oral and visual, in completing and fulfilling its latent promise as drama, is to bring to plausible life on the stage scenes of confusion and combat. Ever since Schiller marshalled the hosts of Wallenstein in his great trilogy, ever since Shakespeare set the legions of Roman civil strife chasing each other over the battlefield of Philippi in Julius Caesar, ever since Aristophanes sent the old men of Athens to a scalding bath at the hands of Lysistrata's conspirators on the Acropolis...