The Slump was first produced February 5, 1920, by "The 47 Workshop" with the following cast:
| Florence Madden | Miss Ruth Chorpenning. |
| James Madden | Mr. Walton Butterfield. |
| Edward Mix | Mr. W. B. Leach, Jr. |
Permission to reprint, or for amateur or professional performances of any kind must first be obtained from "The 47 Workshop," Harvard College, Cambridge, Mass. Moving picture rights reserved.
Time: The Present. About four o'clock on a Saturday afternoon in December.
THE SLUMP
A Play
By Frederic L. Day
[Scene: A dingy room showing the very worst of contemporary lower middle-class American taste. The dining table in the center is of "golden oak"; and a sideboard at the left, a morris chair at the right and front, and three dining-room chairs (one of which is in the left rear corner, the others at the table) are all of this same finish. The paper on the walls is at once tawdry and faded. A tarnished imitation brass gas jet is suspended from the right wall, just over the morris chair. In the back wall and to the left is a door leading outside. Another door, in the left wall, leads to the rest of the house. A low, rather dirty window in the back wall, to the right of the center, looks out on a muddy river with the dispiriting houses of a small, grimy manufacturing city beyond. On the back wall are one or two old-fashioned engravings with sentimental subjects, and several highly-colored photographs of moving picture stars, each of them somewhat askew. A few pictures on the other walls are mostly cheap prints cut out of the rotogravure section of the Sunday paper. In the right-hand rear corner is an air-tight stove. The whole room has an appearance of hopeless untidiness and slovenliness. Close by the morris chair, at its right, is a phonograph on a stand. Outside it is a dull gray day. The afternoon light is already beginning to wane.
As the curtain rises, James Madden is sitting behind the table in the center of the room. He is a rather small man of thirty-five, his hair just beginning to turn gray at the temples. Spectacles, a peering manner, and the sallow pallor of his face all suggest the man of a sedentary mode of life. His clothes are faded and of a poor cut, but brushed and neat. There is something ineffectual but distinctly appealing about the little man. Madden is working on a pile of bills which are strewn over the top of the table. He picks up a bill, looks at it, and draws in his under lip with an expression of dismay. He writes down the amount of the bill on a piece of paper, below six or seven other rows of figures. He looks at another bill, and his expression becomes even more distracted.]