In this excerpt, Krutch discusses the worldwide popularity of Sartre's play, affirming its appeal as both an intellectual treatise and an entertaining work of theatre. Of the work's virtues in the latter category, Krutch praises the play for a "genuinely macabre quality."

No Exit (Biltmore Theater) is the English version of a phenomenally successful French play by Jean Paul Sartre, high priest of existentialism. The scene is hell, the running time only a little over an hour and a quarter, and the total effect that of a rather ingenious shocker of a sort which would not have been out of place on the program at the Grand Guignol a generation ago. Three people—a Lesbian, a male collaborationist, and an American playgirl who murdered her child—find themselves after death shut up together in a hotel room. They enter at once upon a brief cycle of disputation...