When Street Scene was first produced, most critics praised the play for its realism and its characterizations. R. Dana Skinner of Commonweal called it "a play of extraordinary sweep, power and intensity, which catches up with amazing simplicity and sincere feeling the ragged, glowing, humor and tragic life that pours in and out of one of those brownstone apartment houses hovering on the upper edge of the slum district of New York." New York Times critic J. Brooks Atkinson was also nearly unqualified in his praise. He wrote, "He has transferred intact to the stage a segment of representative New York life, preserving not only its appearance but its character, relating it not only to the city but to humanity."

Atkinson also approved of Rice's characterizations. In another review, he wrote, "Mr. Rice has succeeded in relating it to life and enlisting your sympathies for the...