Men in White opened to rave reviews in 1933. In The Nation, Joseph Wood Krutch called it an ‘‘extraordinary production of an extraordinary play.’’ This ‘‘genuine work of art,’’ Krutch lauded, ‘‘furnishes an experience which is thrilling and absorbing.’’ New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson wrote two glowing reviews of what he called ‘‘a good, brave play’’ within one week’s timespan. He found that the play was ‘‘warm with life and high in aspiration.’’ Arthur Pollock wrote in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle that the play ‘‘shines continuously with a steady intelligence.’’ Most of these reviewers’ contemporaries agreed; ten of twelve critics named Men in White as one of the best plays of the year, and it went on to win the Pulitzer Prize.

John Mason Brown was the primary voice of dissent, asserting in the New York Evening Post that the play was ‘‘piffling’’ and ‘‘mildewed in its hokum.’’ While the play’s advocates were not immune to its weaknesses—for instance, Atkinson questioned the play’s ‘‘slavish fondness for medical terms’’ and Krutch admitted that ‘‘it can hardly be said that there is anything completely new in [its] theme’’—the vast majority of audiences responded favorably to the compelling social issues, human drama, and triumph of the dedicated medical profession.

Men in White quickly moved beyond New York, touring the United States and on to productions in London, Vienna, and Budapest, all to equally receptive audiences. The American medical community was particularly receptive to the play, which was reviewed in medical journals and bulletins. The Medical Record even recommended it for ‘‘wives and fiancées of physicians and those who depend or expect to depend on a physician’s income . . . [and] every medical man, for it gives to the public a clearer idea of the ideals and the problems of our profession.’’

The later years, however, were not as kind to Men in White. In a retrospective of Kingsley’s career in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Paul Bailey acknowledges that the ‘‘play is dated’’; Kingsley’s dramatic techniques, which are ‘‘frozen in the 1930s,’’ have ‘‘not aged well.’’ Despite this weakness, however, Bailey asserts that because ‘‘it is imbued with a sense of optimism in the future and in progress, and as a reflection of attitudes in the 1930s it remains historically significant.’’ Other contemporary critics and scholars have pointed out that the social issues raised by Kingsley remain relevant, even more than six decades later. As Couch writes in her introduction to Sidney Kingsley, Five Prizewinning Plays, ‘‘And in this time in which some form of all the humans rights issues and social problems dealt with in these plays are still, or again, with us, Sidney Kingsley has proven to be a playwright whose work is timely as well as timeless.’’