[4] Produced and staged by William Harris Jr., with settings by Livingstone Platt, it starred Muriel Kirkland, Verree Teasdale, and Dorothy Hall.
One reviewer criticized its moral quality even as he praised its writing and performance,[5] while another put it on his end of season "Best Plays" list.
Act I (Scene 1: A private backroom in a New York City nightclub) Schatze, Polaire, and Jean meet up after the latter's return from Paris.
(Curtain) The play was still incomplete in May 1930 when William Harris Jr. flew to Hollywood from New York to discuss casting with Zoe Akins.
[8] Akins had made the decision back in July, before departing Hollywood for New York to begin casting, according to The Los Angeles Times.
[11][12][13] However, a week before the tryout it was reported that Verree Teasdale was joining the cast, and nothing further is heard of Martha Lorber in connection with this play.
[20] The Brooklyn Times Union reported the first night audience included Edward G. Robinson, Ina Claire, Frank Conroy, George Cukor, Mary Nash, Lee Shubert, John Van Druten, Robert Benchley, Texas Guinan, Mrs. Henry B. Harris, Edgar Selwyn and Ruth Selwyn.
Brooks Atkinson in The New York Times summed up his reaction: "One act interests you, though not without misgivings; the second alarms you by its daze and sluggishness, and then the third, which at last begins to give some heed to finding a conclusion, amuses you with some of the neatest dialogue Miss Atkins has written".
[2] He felt that the best part of the play was how the trio of Schatze, Jean, and Polaire interacted: "...[they] hurl short and ugly words at each other, pass cutting insults, steal, scratch and insinuate, and yet remain loyal as a group...".
[1] Like Atkinson, Rowland Field from the Brooklyn Times Union thought the play worked well only in the first and third acts, and its strongest point the intrarelations of the fortune-hunting trio.
[5] But he balanced this praise with a negative assessment of its content: "But that the play is essentially shallow, unblushingly bold and utterly without moral justification... is equally true".
[22] An article in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reproduced a fragment from the Courtesan Dialogues[fn 1] of Lucian of Samosata to illustrate the universality of discourse for Akins' modern hetairai.