Warren is a freelance writer with a master of fine art's degree in writing from Vermont College. In this essay, he explores the deeper issues of this staged production as they contributed to its Broadway success.

Sidney Kingsley's three-act play, Men in White, is a mix of social commentary on moral issues and soapopera drama. But more than this, it is a deeply felt philosophical treatise on humanity. The visible, driving emotional force of the play is a young intern's struggle to integrate his career with an upcoming marriage. Its hospital setting uses lifeand-death issues, love, and betrayal to pull the audience toward a conclusion. The drama of the intern's tortured conscience over a sexual impropriety, which eventually causes the death of a young nurse, rakes the conclusion with profundity. The actual cause of her death, a botched, back-street abortion, becomes an underlying moral theme, seldom discussed...