[1] The play opened on Broadway at the Ambassador Theatre on October 16, 1968, and closed on December 29, 1968, after 85 performances.
[4] This "phantasmagoric world in which actors might not know where the grease paint ended and the blood began",[4] where the audience is led to believe in both levels of reality as the borders blend and blur in manner reminiscent of the works of Luigi Pirandello,[5] is used by Heller to satirize and excoriate the moral blindness that leads people to treat war as spectacle, equating the real death and suffering of war with the deaths of actors in war movies.
[4] New York Times theatre critic Clive Barnes gave the play a mixed review ("I would call it a bad play any good playwright should be proud to have written, and any good audience fascinated to see");[4] the New York Post was more enthusiastic ("An exceptional quality of imagination that is at once comic, bitter and moving, and it is immensely effective in dramatic terms").
[9][1] In the original Broadway production, players included Ron Leibman, Anthony Holland, Jason Robards, Diana Sands and William Roerick.
[4] Although its eleven-week run was respectable, the play is generally considered to have not been a success,[10] but a Broadway revival was staged in 1972 at the Circle in the Square Theatre, featuring Steven Keats and James Doerr,[11] and the play has been occasionally staged at various venues throughout the rest of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.