Poet's Play

PANIC, A PLAY IN VERSE--Archibald MacLeish--Houghton Mifflin ($2).

In Elizabethan days every dramatist was a poet, every playgoer a poetry lover. But nowadays poets generally leave their Muse behind when they go to town. To most moderns, poetic drama means selfconscious, little-theatre stuff-&-nonsense. Ambitious Poet Archibald MacLeish (Conquistador), seeing no good reason for the modern notion that Poetry is by nature a bad actor, has tried his hand at a verse-play. His first attempt. Panic, took him 16 months to write.* Playgoing readers will find it an exciting experiment, will hope Author MacLeish's example may attract some others.

Though written in modern and, at times, colloquial speech, Panic follows the tested tradition of Greek tragedy in portraying the destruction of a hero by the modern equivalent of the Greek conception of Fate, the conception of inevitable economic collapse. The play is not divided into acts but shows scenes alternating between a banker's office and a city street. Time is an evening in February 1933, just before the bank moratorium. Doomed hero is one McGafferty, No. 1 Banker of the U. S. While his office ticker stutters its frantic news of crashing banks, riots, panic, and the crowds in the street mutter their comment, McGafferty faces a conference of frightened bankers, tries to bully them into a pool. While their conference is going on a group of unemployed, led by a blind man, breaks into the office. McGafferty defies them; the bankers cower. But the blind leader reads McGafferty aright, tells him his destiny is doom. When the intruders are cleared out the conference breaks up in failure; the bankers scuttle away like rats.

McGafferty refuses to admit defeat, tries to bolster up the failing banks singlehanded. His mistress lone comes to fetch him away from the life-&-death struggle, which to her is just another hard day at the office. When he learns that his most trusted associate has shot himself, McGafferty throws up the sponge, goes to meet his own fate.

Bankers will not like either Author MacLeish's tone or his implications; neither will radicals. Between the Yes & No of Communism and Capitalism he preserves a catalytic neutrality. Neither McGafferty nor the angry unemployed speak for their author, who saves his thunder for the last line, shouted by the chorus: "Man's fate is a drum !''

Panic is written not in blank verse which Author MacLeish believes has "all but killed the use of poetry in the theatre" but in a line of five accents falling as the sense suggests rather than as the rules of prosody require. Example:

Kind of plague of the soul a man might say!

Every need to live by and they won't live.

Old days there were plagues of the flesh --famine :

Bad crops: pestilence: things you could see.

Now there's nothing--good health--fat land--bins full.

Yes--and still they're sick of it: still dying.

But by & large Poet MacLeish's difficult experiment has succeeded: his direct, dramatic verse has caught "the rhythm of the spoken language of his time and place."

*Manhattan playgoers will have one chance to see Panic acted out at the Imperial Theatre, March 15.

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