New York Times critic Clive Barnes described Poor Murderer as "a strange, dazzling … intellectual play that zigzags across the stage and richochets across the mind."

The play's protagonist Anton Ignatyevich Kerzhentsev is a young turn-of-the-century Russian actor confined in the St. Elizabeth Institute for Nervous Disorders in St. Petersburg….

[He] is granted permission to stage an autobiographical play in the great hall of the institute as a means of proving to the authorities and to himself that he is sane as well as guilty of a murderous act of passion. It becomes subtly apparent that Kerzhentsev's performance of the play-within-the-play is a desperate attempt to refute to himself and others his fear of being passionless; but the result is his realization that for his whole life, he, more than anyone else, has perpetrated his own emotional incarceration.

Poor Murderer is neither a great nor always dramatically satisfying play...