Since Martin's major focus is acting in and writing for movies, he does not produce a great deal of writing apart from screenplays. Consequently, his few dramatic pieces and few narratives (short stories, one novella and one novel) have attracted little scholarly attention. WASP, in particular, has received mostly brief periodical and newspaper reviews, which appear whenever it is staged.

The reviews following WASP's first staging at New York's Joseph Papp Public Theater in 1995, which took place as an evening including three other one acts by Martin, were not as favorable as those which he received for Picasso at the Lapin Agile. In New York's Village Voice review, critic Michael Feingold states, of the evening as a whole, "What Steve Martin wishes to devote his playwriting career to is also anyone's guess. Does he in fact really want one? His four one-acts at the Public...