[5] MacLeish submitted the play in response to a general invitation by the producers of the Columbia Workshop for the submission of experimental works.

[6] MacLeish acknowledged he was inspired by the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria by Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers Party.

The momentary calming of the crowd achieved by the Orator is interrupted by the arrival of a Second Messenger, who reports that the newly conquered peoples have embraced the conqueror.

The General calls for resistance but the people have already given up hope and renounced their freedom echoing the prophecy "Masterless men must take a master!"

The Announcer concludes: "The city has fallen ..."[5][7][8][9] We had a CBS experimental theater of the air called the Columbia Workshop, which pioneered all kinds of special sound effects and other dramatic techniques.

In 1937 it put on a poetic drama by Archibald MacLeish called The Fall of the City, featuring a 22-year-old actor with an unforgettably expressive voice.

It also made the actor, Orson Welles, an overnight star.The cast of the Columbia Workshop broadcast premiere is listed as it appears in The Fall of the City, the text of the play published April 26, 1937, by Farrar & Rinehart.

William N. Robson was responsible for crowd supervision; Brewster Morgan was editorial supervisor; and the stage manager was Earle McGill.

A hidden floor lamp is shining on a group of men and women holding scripts, who are probably the "voices of citizens" who speak antiphonally near the end of the play.

Herrmann's pose is a key source that suggests three possible moments at which the picture was taken: The third option can be discarded since there would be no need for so many actors to be holding scripts if the play was seconds from being over.

Here are all the technical excellences: the alternating shifts in accent; the adroit juxtaposition of oratory and plain speech; the variations of rhyme, assonance, and dissonance; above all, the atmosphere of suspense which this poet can communicate so well.

The reader is convinced that these are events, not images, that "the people invent their oppressors," and that, with the fall of the city, "the long labor of liberty" is ended.

[17] But an unsigned review in TIME magazine noted: "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.

Aaron Stein, writing for the New York Post, criticized the clash between typical radio fare and serious drama:... we are bothered by the feeling that a less mystically taciturn script might have offered easier going to an audience that has been pretty thoroughly conditioned away from listening with anything like concentration.

If in that respect it failed, the failure is not the fault of the drama or of the audience but of the background of broadcasting which created in the listener a habit of only casual attention...Mr. MacLeish's theme was presented in terms that were more thoughtful than dramatic.

His bitter tale of human unwillingness to sustain the burden of freedom could to advantage have been more concretely particularized, but we are more concerned with his use of the microphone than with the purely literary aspects of his work.

[2] The first staged production took place in June 1938, when students at Smith College under the direction of Edith Burnett,[19] adapted the play for dance as part of the school's commencement program.

[21] The play was presented again in the Columbia Workshop series on September 28, 1939, again featuring Orson Welles[22] but broadcast from the Hollywood Bowl (though without any musical accompaniment), where the crowds were portrayed by students from the University of California, Los Angeles.

[23] A CBS television version was aired in 1962, as part of the ACCENT series, starring John Ireland, Colleen Dewhurst, Ossie Davis and Tim O'Connor.

[25] Jack Iams, TV critic of the New York Herald Tribune, observed "It is equally applicable today to the threat of world communism.

It was preceded by a documentary on the original broadcast which featured interviews with the film critic Leonard Maltin and the director Peter Bogdanovich.

"[2] The experimental aspect of The Fall of the City was "the use of the natural paraphernalia of the ordinary broadcast, that is to say, an announcer in the studio and a reporter in the field...a very successful device it turned out to be.