[2] The play opened Off-Broadway, produced by the Signature Theatre Company at The Peter Norton Space on December 1, 1998 and closed on January 10, 1999.
The cast starred David Aaron Baker (Scooper), Katie Finneran (Deidre), and Mary Louise Wilson (Henny).
[5] John Simon wrote in New York that the play was the latest in a "series of unconsideredly churned-out catastrophes" that Guare had written after his early success.
"[9] The 1998 Signature Theatre Company production (which revised the structure to integrate the prologue into the first act) also met with critical approval.
[5] The New York Post's Donald Lyons called it a "triumph",[10] while Vincent Canby in the Times thought "Mary Louise Wilson's performance as the old lady" was "viciously articulate", and he characterized the play as "a way station between the playwright's first major work, The House of Blue Leaves (1971), and his last hit, Six Degrees of Separation (1990).
[5] Playwright Paula Vogel called Bosoms "one of the more influential and devastating experiences in her years of going to the theatre" (In a 1997 interview with Playbill On Line).