MOST ATTEMPTS TO ACCOUNT FOR THE POPULARITY of American psychological drama include a claim that audiences look to it for a comforting release from the deep troubles of the age. This observation, though now almost too familiar to command attention, is reasonably accurate. The age is troubled. It carries a weight of worry over international unrest at least as great as burdened the decade immediately preceding World War II, and the affluence amid which the American population worries has created other anxieties no less keen than those born of poverty in that not-so-distant decade. It is also true that most of the new plays give comfort, and that audiences are grateful for it. But on this point we must pause for speculation, if ever we are to make a sensible appraisal of the notions our popular playwrights bring to us. It is time to give thought to what lies under the skillful plot construction, character development, and turns of phrase in the work of a Tennessee Williams, a William Inge, a Paddy Chaye£sky—to look at the heart of their mystery. Much too seldom does the public for new plays or the corps of critics who speak for it question these playwrights' casual procedure for offering encouragement, or recognize that the comfort they offer is only temporary. No "healing" process undergone by any of the disturbed protagonists of Broadway could take effect outside the theater, and it is both dangerous and unintelligent to think otherwise, as unfortunately many persons who observe them do think. Our new playwrights, like the most popular playwrights before the war, are propagandists of a sort who would have us believe that we can allay our most serious troubles by not much more than will power alone. Though we may admire qualities of their work to the same degree that we admire certain qualities of such propaganda plays as, say, Shakespeare's Henry V or Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession, we should be wary of their propensity for evasiveness, question-begging, and special pleading.