“The Most Miserable Experience” Ayn Rand Ever Had: The Battle over Night of January 16th

Ayn Rand’s Broadway hit put the audience on trial—but behind the curtain, she struggled to defend the integrity of her artistic vision.

Oct 08, 2025

September 16, 2025, marks ninety years since Night of January 16th premiered on Broadway.1 Before the publication of her four major fictional works, Ayn Rand achieved her first commercial success with this courtroom drama. The history of Night of January 16th, as revealed through materials housed in the Ayn Rand Archives (as well as her introduction to the play’s 1968 edition), showcases Rand’s battle for the creative integrity of her play — an experience that informed her later writing.

Woman on Trial at the Hollywood Playhouse

Rand wrote the play sometime during 1932 and 1933.2 Its plot revolves around the trial of Karen Andre, who has been accused of murdering her wealthy paramour, Bjorn Faulkner. Faulkner, who never appears onstage, is described by some witnesses as a daring visionary undone by envy, others as a swindler who ruined lives through fraud.

These portraits matter because they shape how the jury interprets Andre’s role: was she the accomplice of a con man who finally turned on him, or the loyal partner of a genius betrayed by his enemies? With the factual evidence balanced, the case hinges on the credibility of the witnesses, and the values they personify.3

Karen Andre and her lover embody ambition and independence, while the prosecution upholds conformity and conventionality. And because the play’s famous gimmick was to draw the jury from the audience (thereby allowing them to determine the ending), the verdict reveals an implicit philosophical viewpoint on the part of the jurors. In a note to producers, Rand wrote: “It is really the audience who is thus put on trial. In the words of the defense attorney: ‘It is your own souls that will be brought to light when your decision is rendered!’”4

Despite an initial round of rejections, the play received offers from two different producers in 1934.5 One was E. E. Clive, a British actor and director who ran a modest stock company at the Hollywood Playhouse in Los Angeles.6 The other offer came from A. H. Woods, a seasoned producer of Broadway melodramas.7 But Woods demanded the right to alter the script “at his sole discretion.”8

For Rand, an ambitious writer who had not yet published her first novel, having her play produced on Broadway would have been a tremendous step forward in her career.

Rand refused, choosing E. E. Clive’s small theater instead. “Of course, there was no comparison professionally,” Rand recalled. “[A] [b]roadway production versus a Hollywood small theater. . . . I chose the small theater because I didn’t want to give Woods the okay on the script.”9

According to Rand, Clive “really understood the play” and her “kind of writing, in the right way.”10 However, he did insist on at least one change: the play’s title. Rand’s original, Penthouse Legend, hinted at the play’s “nonrealistic, symbolic nature.”11 Clive thought it was “a sophisticated title” that would turn off audiences, claiming that “the public was antagonized by the word ‘Legend,’ and he cited the failure of some movies which had used that word in their titles.”12

Although Rand was unconvinced by this explanation, she acquiesced over an issue that she felt (at the time) was unimportant, but about which Clive felt very strongly.13 They settled on a new title: Woman on Trial.14 Decades later, Rand regretted the change and still preferred the original.15

Rand remembered Clive as “a very good director,” even if “there wasn’t much he could do with those actors.” She felt that most of the cast could not project the “special kind of conscious focus” her dialogue required, yet she respected the effort Clive put into working with them. Of lead actress Barbara Bedford, (who, in Rand’s view, looked perfect for the role but struggled to deliver her lines convincingly) Rand recalled that “the director worked with her very hard.”16

Despite her dissatisfaction with the actors’ performances, Rand was careful not to “butt into the direction,” and would only consult on the performances with Clive’s permission or when he asked questions. “I could discuss what the line means or . . . the emotion to be projected, but I couldn’t direct . . . and didn’t try to.”17

Although Rand recalled the thrill of seeing her name on the marquee (fulfilling a dream she had had while living in Russia), by the time Woman on Trial opened at the Hollywood Playhouse on October 22, 1934, she said that she “couldn’t stand a line of that play. . . . I like to hear my lines read as they should be or not at all. . . . [I]t was not the way I would have wanted them read and acted.”18

Overall, she characterized the production as “competent,” but “unexciting,” “unstylized,” and “handicapped by lack of funds.”19

Ayn Rand’s Broadway Trial

When the Hollywood run closed after 3–4 weeks, A. H. Woods (the Broadway producer that Rand had previously rejected) renewed his offer.20 This time, Rand’s agent negotiated a contract clause that promised any changes would be made “by mutual consent.”21 Rand thought the phrasing was “very dubiously worded,” and that she was “fairly certain that it still gave Woods the control he wanted.”22 She accepted anyway: “I blindly decided for once — I will take a chance,” trusting her own “power of persuasion” to convince Woods about any changes.23

This decision resulted in what Rand described as “the most miserable experience of any I’ve ever had.”24

Woods insisted on another title change, Night of January 16th, which Rand later referred to as “an empty, meaningless title . . . [but] the least offensive . . . of those suggested to me.”25 She allowed it for the same reason as the previous production: she “did not want the producers to work under the pressure of doubt or fear in regard to an issue about which they felt very strongly,” and which she (at the time) considered nonessential.26 Though again, like Woman on Trial, she later regretted this title change.27

Later, to “liven up” Rand’s script, Woods introduced “in small touches, a junk heap of worn, irrelevant melodramatic devices that clashed with the style.”28

Seeking to preserve her artistic vision, Rand fought back, line by line, “to the limit of my brain and endurance.”29 Sometimes Woods conceded. She recalled sending him a long letter outlining her disagreement over a casting decision, to which he replied, “You know, it was a damn good letter. You are a good arguer.”30

In another exchange, Woods scolded her from the front row of an empty theater: “How can you be so stubborn? . . . This is your first play and I’ve been in the theater for forty years!”31 Rand answered that “it was not a matter of personalities, age or experience, not a matter of who said it, but of what was said, and that I would give in to his office boy, if the boy happened to be right.”32

Rand explained that she “managed to prevent the worst of the changes he wanted to introduce, and I managed to preserve the best of the passages he wanted to eliminate, but that was all I could do.”33

And so, Night of January 16th opened at the Ambassador Theatre on September 16, 1935.34

Reviews were mixed, but the show was considered a success, running for six months, followed by tours in Chicago, Los Angeles, and London.35 The jury gimmick became a sensation. Celebrities volunteered nightly, and the producer’s office “was besieged by requests.”36 Chicago drama critic Ashton Stevens called it “the fastest courtroom melo I ever saw,” adding: “There is a kind of genius in the play. . . . [I]t’s the best mystery take I’ve seen or read in seasons.”37 Rand referred to Stevens’s article as “the only review that pleased me in my entire career. . . . [H]e understood the technique of drama, knew what it takes and praised me for the best aspects of the play’s structure; he praised me for an attribute which only a viewer in full focus can appreciate: ingenuity.”38

About ten months before the play’s opening, Rand and her husband relocated from California to New York with only $50.39 The play vaulted her from an $11-a-week budget to some weeks in which she received $1,200 in royalties (approximately $28,000 in today’s purchasing power).40

Yet Rand felt defeated. “By the time the play opened on Broadway . . . it was dead, as far as I was concerned. . . . It was not merely a mangled body, but worse: it was a mangled body with some of its torn limbs still showing a former beauty.”41 After opening night, she never went to see it again.42

Later, the amateur acting edition was bowdlerized — stripped of content to satisfy school and church censorship.43 The Hollywood film version, released in 1941, bore no resemblance to Rand’s play. Calling the film a “cheap, trashy vulgarity,” Rand explained that “there is nothing of mine in that movie, except the names of some of the characters and the title (which was not mine). The only line of dialogue from my play which appears in the movie is: ‘The court will now adjourn till ten o’clock tomorrow morning.’”44

Lessons That Shaped The Fountainhead

On December 4, 1935, just a few months after the play opened on Broadway, Rand began writing planning notes for The Fountainhead.45

Seen in this context, Rand’s later refusal to alter key aspects of The Fountainhead, a work that she viewed as a masterpiece, comes into focus. Editors and publishers urged her to soften Howard Roark or trim his speeches.46 But having once seen her creation disfigured, she would not let it happen again.

The Fountainhead contains a passage that mirrors how Rand likely felt towards the alterations of Night of January 16th. In the novel’s final act, a building designed by Roark is mangled by a committee of inferior architects: “The building had the skeleton of what Roark had designed, with the remnants of ten different breeds piled on the lovely symmetry of the bones.”47

Reclaiming the Play

For twenty-five years, Rand refused to reread the Broadway script. Only when students in the 1960s requested a reading of the play did she reconstruct it from her original drafts, excising all but one line that Woods had added.48

It was republished in 1968, accompanied by an introduction that both reclaimed the play and recounted its troubled history, including her struggles to defend her artistic vision. “Up to now,” she wrote, “I had felt as if [Night of January 16th] were an illegitimate child roaming the world. Now, with this publication, it becomes legitimately mine. And, although it has played all over the world, I feel as if it were a play that has never been produced.”49

In 1973, she approved a revival under the original title Penthouse Legend, making several dozen small updates. Leonard Peikoff later confirmed these as her final, authoritative revisions.50 The version now available in Three Plays is the one Rand intended posterity to read — the version that best concretizes the conflict between independence versus conformity — the same clash of values that animated her mature fiction. And ninety years after the play’s Broadway premiere, it deserves to be read.

Image credit: Photograph by Bruno of Hollywood (Ayn Rand Archives)

“‘Night of January 16’ a Hit at Ambassador,” New York World-Telegram, September 17, 1935, Ayn Rand Archives, 172_02o_014.

Ayn Rand, Biographical Interview #5 by Barbara Branden and Nathaniel Branden, December 30, 1960, transcript, p. 166–67 (Ayn Rand Archives).

Rand, “Note to Producer,” in Three Plays, 16.

Rand, “Note to Producer,” 16.

Rand, “Introduction to Night of January 16th,” 8; Rand, Biographical Interview #5, 170.