"The Fat Man's Wife" received the sharpest criticism of any of the five exhumed plays; in "The New Yorker", John Lahr called it a "heterosexual fantasy awash with false emotion and bad writing," and "The New York Times" noted that "Williams is obviously attempting to write in a style entirely alien to him, trying on a faux-urbane manner that fits him like a rented tuxedo in the wrong size."