- part of the opening festival for WNYC's new semi-public recording studio The Greene Space. Originally aired in 1937 (and recorded in the Park Avenue Armory), it was evidently the piece which established radio plays as serious culture in this country. As a review in Time Magazine put it:Aside from the beauty of its speech and the power of its story, The Fall of the City proved to most listeners that the radio, which conveys only sound, is science's gift to poetry and poetic drama, that 30 minutes is an ideal time for a verse play, that artistically radio is ready to come of age, for in the hands of a master a $10 receiving set can become a living theatre, its loudspeaker a national proscenium.
I mention it also because some folks from my college have small speaking parts, and several others are part of the noisy crowd - including yours truly. It's a weird thing to enact a crowd on the radio, especially a crowd restive and hopeful and fearful and relieved and panicked and ultimately seduced - and as other characters are trying to speak over it. After just two runthroughs I'm finding myself unsettled by the volatile energy of this behavior... Check it out if you can - it's powerful stuff.
PS Here's a picture of the rehearsal from a website about the show.
