The play debuted on Sunday, January 6, 1935 as part of a benefit performance for New Theatre magazine at the Civic Repertory Theatre on 14th Street. It premiered on Broadway at the Longacre Theatre on March 26, 1935, under the auspices of the Group Theatre, a New York City theatre company founded by Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford and Lee Strasberg, of which Odets was a member. The company was founded as a training ground for actors, and also to support new plays, especially those that expressed the social and political climate of the day. The play was requested by many theater and labor groups in numerous other cities around the United States. It premiered in London, England in 1936 at Unity Theatre, and was revived there most recently in 2013.