“Wall Street lays an egg": financial drama and the 1933 banking collapse in Archibald MacLeish’s Panic: a drama of industrial crisis (1935)

Asserting that the Wall Street Crash was a drama staged in the public arena of the early 1930s, this essay examines the context and performance history of the poet Archibald MacLeish’s verse-drama about the suicide of a banker, Panic: A Drama of Industrial Crisis (1935). The play is one of very few representations on stage of the banking crash of 1933 and marks a turning point in the politics of both the writer and his audience. Looking through the prism of contemporary reviews, letters and memoirs from the era, this essay pieces together historical fragments about this play and its performances to explain how a liberal pro-capitalist writer, such as MacLeish, came together with the Marxist critics of New Masses magazine, to create a historic final-night performance of his now-forgotten play.