Cherry Lane Theatre: The Poets' Playhouse

Why is it significant?

Look across at the charming arched brick facade and bold red entry doors of the Cherry Lane Theatre, nestled on the quiet bend of Commerce Street.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Look across at the charming arched brick facade and bold red entry doors of the Cherry Lane Theatre, nestled on the quiet bend of Commerce Street. This cozy brick playhouse is celebrated as the birthplace of the Off-Broadway movement, where American experimental theater discovered its rebellious voice. Commerce Street itself takes a dramatic right-angle elbow bend here, framing the playhouse like a stage set out of old London.

The building began its life in eighteen seventeen as a humble farm silo on the estate of merchant Alexander Hamilton's apothecary. Over the following century, as the rural pastures transformed into city streets, the structure served as a tobacco warehouse, a brewery, and a box factory.

In nineteen twenty-four, a group of bohemian writers led by poet Edna St. Vincent Millay took over the abandoned box warehouse. Millay had just won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry—the third woman ever to do so—and she was determined to build an intimate, uncompromising theater free from the commercial pressures of Times Square. They installed secondhand seats, painted the walls, and christened it the Cherry Lane Playhouse.

Millay and her circle staged provocative, avant-garde plays that Broadway producers were terrified to touch. The Cherry Lane introduced New York audiences to the Theater of the Absurd, hosting the sensational American premiere of Samuel Beckett's Endgame in nineteen fifty-eight, alongside groundbreaking works by Harold Pinter, Eugene Ionesco, and Edward Albee.

An astonishing roster of twentieth-century stars launched their theatrical careers inside this tiny, one-hundred-and-seventy-nine-seat auditorium. A teenage Barbra Streisand worked here as an usher and ticket-taker, dreaming of stardom; James Earl Jones, Gene Hackman, Cicely Tyson, and Bea Arthur all honed their craft on this intimate stage, performing just inches away from spellbound audiences. Through a century of radical changes, the Cherry Lane has proven that great dramatic revolutions begin in the smallest rooms.