The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail is one of Lawrence and Lee's most famous plays, although it has received very little critical attention. As Alan Woods wrote in his introduction to the play in The Selected Plays of Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, the play was "widely produced across North America," but "was deliberately never performed either on or off Broadway." As Woods noted, Lawrence and Lee did this to demonstrate "that the theatre could be born and continue to live elsewhere than on a few blocks of Manhattan real estate." As a result, the New York dramatic critics did not review the play. However, as Woods wrote in his general introduction to The Selected Plays of Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, the play "was a landmark success in the regional theatre movement."

This pattern of having many successful productions with little critical commentary has been repeated since the play's first productions in 1970. In fact, with rare exception, the only criticism has come from regional newspapers that reviewed local performances, such as Christopher Rowan's 1998 review in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Rowan called the play "charmingly artless but also clunky," saying that the play mixes "family comedy" with "homespun philosophy and high-minded debate." In addition, the only major academic commentary has been from Woods, who directs the Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute at The Ohio State University—Lawrence's alma mater.

In addition to editing The Selected Plays of Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, Woods also wrote the entries for Lawrence and Lee for the Dictionary of Literary Biography. As he noted in his Lawrence entry, the play "signaled new modes of production in the American commercial theater," such as having "the stage light grow brighter rather than dimmer" at the end of the play, while "Thoreau strides through the audience to confront the future."

These new modes were used specifically to highlight the playwrights' anti-war message, which resonated with the Vietnam-era audiences. As Woods noted in his introduction to The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail in The Selected Plays of Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, the play "comments on contemporaneous events, as do most of Lawrence and Lee's plays." Although it has still never been produced in New York, the play has achieved international fame. As Woods notes in his Lawrence entry, in 1989, the play was performed in Hong Kong as a memorial to the students killed during the anti-Communism protest in Tiananmen Square. The play is also frequently used in high school and college courses, and in one notable case, a law school course. In his 1997 article, "Fiction Draws Students Into the Culture of Law," Ronald W. Eades noted how he has used the play as one of the texts in his American Legal History course, since the play provides "a fictional account of issues that are raised in the course."

Today, The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail is considered, along with Inherit the Wind—another play based on a historical event—to be one of the playwrights' greatest works.