[7][8] Produced by Kermit Bloomgarden and directed by Sidney Lumet, Night of the Auk's original production starred Martin Brooks (Lt. Jan Kephart), Wendell Corey (Colonel Tom Russell), Christopher Plummer (Lewis Rohnen), Claude Rains (Doctor Bruner) and Dick York (Lt. Mac Hartman).

"[11] Brooks Atkinson wrote in The New York Times: "Stirring up scientific jargon with portentous ideas, [Oboler] writes dialogue that is streaked with purple patches and sounds a good deal like gibberish.

The mood of the return voyage is far from jubilant, what with a loathed egomaniac in command, a succession of murders and suicides, the discovery that full-scale atomic war has broken out on earth, and the knowledge that the rocket ship itself is almost surely doomed.

Closing at week's end, the play mingled one or two thrills with an appalling number of frills, one or two philosophic truths with a succession of Polonius-like truisms, an occasional feeling for language with pretentious and barbarous misuse of it.

[13]According to his own later account, Oboler came to feel during the play's Washington run that the production was doomed due to its overly realistic presentation, which conflicted with the poetic tone of the dialogue.

[14] However, scholar Charles A. Carpenter would later write that the play's "failure as a theatrical as well as literary work... might more accurately be traced to its conflicting modes of parable and melodrama, the first compatible with Oboler's nonrealistic treatment, the second not.

[16] A television adaptation of Night of the Auk was broadcast on The Play of the Week on May 2, 1960, featuring William Shatner as Lewis Rohnen and James MacArthur as Lt.