Critical Overview

The initial critical reception to Rocket to the Moon was mixed. While many critics believed that Odets was attempting to develop his understanding of social and interpersonal relationships, many found his efforts to be lacking. For example, in his New York Herald-Tribune review, Richard Watts Jr. begins by claiming, "Mr. Odets continues to be the most exciting and the most exasperating of the younger American dramatists." Watts ends his review by calling the play a "baffling combination of brilliance and confusion." Like many critics, Watts believes that the play's first act is brilliant but that, in the second half, the play loses its focus and "begins to languish."

Rocket to the Moon (along with Golden Boy) is commonly understood to mark a shift in Odets's dramatic work from a politically aware playwright of the American left to one more focused on inter-personal relations. This claim is a persistent theme in contemporary reviews of the play. This opinion of the trajectory of Odets's work is one that continued long after his death. In his 1989 book Clifford Odets, Gabriel Miller sees Rocket to the Moon as purely a romantic drama. Miller suggests, "Odets was torn between the desire to write about the sociopolitical situation and the increasing pressure of his personal troubles."

As Odets's reputation gained in stature in the late 1990s, a number of critics argued that fewer political plays, such as Rocket to the Moon, are connected to Odets's earlier work than contemporary reviewers might have thought. Christopher J. Herr, for example, argues in Clifford Odets and American Political Theatre, that, while the play "continue[s] his retreat from overtly political drama into a more generalized examination of American life," the connections between it and plays such as Waiting for Lefty are many. The characters, Herr argues, are still driven by economic imperatives (much as the characters in Waiting for Lefty and Awake and Sing!). Herr points out that the play is explicitly set against the backdrop of the Great Depression.