Directed by Elia Kazan, who collaborated with Miller on the script, the cast starred Barbara Loden as Maggie and Jason Robards Jr. as Quentin, along with Ralph Meeker as Mickey,[1] Salome Jens as Holga, and an early appearance by Faye Dunaway as Nurse.

[citation needed] For example, according to Sarah Bradford, in her biography America's Queen: The Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, "Jackie, who had admired Arthur Miller enough to seat him at her table at the Malraux dinner, turned on him for his betrayal of Marilyn in his play After the Fall, which opened in New York on January 23, 1964.

Howard Taubman of The New York Times called Loden's performance "stunning"; he further noted she "all but enkindles the stage, in her early scenes as the warm, childlike enchantress and in her later ones as the sick, frenzied demon of allure bent on self-destruction".

[8] Earl Wilson, in a column for the San Francisco Examiner, wrote Loden "is so good as Marilyn Monroe in Arthur Miller's After the Fall that she has officially tossed her pajama tops into the ring to be the new American Sex Symbol ... and she deserves it".

[9] John Chapman of the New York Daily News called Loden's performance "magnificently played", as well noted she is "ash blonde, very beautiful and very sexy, [and] is an astonishing reminder of the late Marilyn Monroe.

The play remains a collection of sporadically arresting autobiographical fragments—all floating in a glutinous interior monologue that substitutes tortuous rhetoric for psychological or metaphysical insight.