The setting of "The Wild Party" is urban but nonspecific; March, who first drafted the poem when he was just 27, seems to have deliberately omitted any street names or landmarks that would anchor it in a single location. As for March himself, he had every reason to believe "The Wild Party" would mark the start of a long and interesting professional life, which in fact it did.
THE NARRATIVE SUSPENSE built into the question of who's going to be left standing at the end of "The Wild Party" is probably one of the elements that have led several artists over the decades to try to refit the poem to other media.
Spiegelman saw March's work as a memento of a different age: "His generation swilled bathtub gin and had a wild party. Our generation gulps Prozac," he wrote in his introduction.
Looking back, the timeliness of "The Wild Party" in 1994 is due largely to the thing that went unmentioned: the AIDS pandemic, which was, at the moment of the poem's return, approaching its terrible apex in the United States, with nearly 50,000 deaths that year, the overwhelming majority of them gay men.
The poem itself plays a tricky game with moral judgment - is March depicting a mad party that goes on and on until it tumbles inevitably into disaster, or is he indicting the party itself as the disaster's cause? The question of whether compulsive festivity is merely a sign of oblivion about the darkness to come or whether it invites the darkness may sound philosophical rather than urgent.
Both stage versions of "The Wild Party" wrestled thoughtfully with what it would mean to retell its story more than 70 years later; Lippa's version bore in on the romance and reconsidered Queenie as a kind of pathetic, love-starved heroine, while LaChiusa and Wolfe's got rid of the poem's white-guy detachment and replaced it with a more pointed take on just who might have attended that party and why.
source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/06/t-magazine/wild-party-roaring-twenties.html
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