Harold Clurman said of the performance:
Scooping every other critic in town, Henry Senber was at the premiere of Waiting for Lefty and announced the arrival of Odets as an important new American playwright.The first scene of [Waiting for] Lefty had not played two minutes when a shock of delighted recognition struck the audience like a tidal wave. Deep laughter, hot assent, a kind of joyous fervor seemed to sweep the audience toward the stage. The actors no longer performed; they were being carried along as if by an exultancy of communication such as I had never witnessed in the theater before. Audience and actors had become one.[1]
Only one Broadway reviewer was present at the premiere: Henry Senber, second-string drama critic for The Morning Telegraph. He wrote Odets' first Broadway review.[8]
"One left the theatre Sunday evening with two convictions," Senber wrote. "The first was that one had witnessed an event of historical importance in what is academically referred to as the drama of the contemporary American scene. The other was that a dramatist to be reckoned with had been discovered." He concluded, "It has not been announced just where and when Waiting for Lefty will be presented again, but you can rest assured that it will be ... soon. A play like this does not die."[15]
While the energy of the performance greatly stimulated the audience, theater critics reacted less positively to the archetypal characters and the play's socialist leanings. Joseph Wood Krutch wrote:
The villains are mere caricatures and even the very human heroes occasionally freeze into stained-glass attitudes, as, for example, a certain lady secretary in one of the flashbacks does when she suddenly stops in her tracks to pay tribute to "The Communist Manifesto" and to urge its perusal upon all and sundry. No one, however, expects subtleties from a soap-box, and the interesting fact is that Mr. Odets has invented a form which turns out to be a very effective dramatic equivalent of soap-box oratory.[16]
