Zeffirelli first saw the play on Broadway in January 1964 and expressed interest in acquiring the performance rights for Italy. At the time, Miller was already negotiating with Marcello Mastroianni, who wanted to stage the play with Luchino Visconti as director, but was unable to commit to specific dates. Thus, Miller reached an agreement with Zeffirelli, who renewed his collaboration with Giorgio Albertazzi and cast Monica Vitti in the lead role. Vitti was then at the peak of her career, having won numerous awards for her performances in Michelangelo Antonioni’s films.
While the play itself did not entirely convince critics, the production was warmly received. Some reviewers were tempted to compare it with the version Visconti staged almost simultaneously in Paris, featuring Michel Auclair and Annie Girardot. In his autobiography "Timebends. A life", Miller wrote: “We had come to Paris for the Luchino Visconti production of "After the Fall" with Annie Girardot. I had found it unfocused. His acutely thought-out movies notwithstanding, Visconti seemed to have missed the verb of the play, regarding it as a sort of exposé of primitive American sexual perplexities. There would be a far more incisive production, directed by Franco Zeffirelli in Rome, with Monica Vitti and Giorgio Albertazzi. Zeffirelli was not afraid to allow Quentin the full anguish of a man not at all trying to explain himself but searching for himself, a different attitude entirely, and one I thought moving and persuasive. His set was a series of six or eight concentric steel rectangles growing progressively smaller upstage – it was like looking through the back of a bellows camera toward the lens in the far distance – and the black velour between each square allowed actors to enter and exit up of the whole very deep stage while silent lifts in the floor raised and lowered pieces of furniture to create and erase the locations in Quentin’s mind almost instantaneously, as in a dream or reverie. The production toured the main Italian cities, and its reception confirmed the play for me.”