Wikipedia Deep Dive

Cherry Lane Theatre

15 min read

Before Bob Dylan was Bob Dylan—before the harmonica and the Nobel Prize and the cultural mythology—he was just a kid from Minnesota playing to a handful of people in a converted grain silo. The venue was the Cherry Lane Theatre, and the year was sometime in the early 1960s, back when "going to see a show in the Village" meant stumbling into something genuinely strange and possibly transformative.

The Cherry Lane holds a peculiar distinction: it's the oldest continuously running off-Broadway theater in New York City. That phrase—"off-Broadway"—deserves a moment of explanation. Broadway proper refers to the major commercial theaters clustered around Times Square, those grand palaces seating a thousand or more people, where tickets cost as much as a nice dinner and productions are calibrated for mass appeal. Off-Broadway emerged as the rebellious younger sibling, a network of smaller venues scattered throughout Manhattan where experimental work could find an audience without the crushing financial pressure of a Broadway run.

The Cherry Lane sits at the heart of this tradition, tucked away on Commerce Street in Greenwich Village, a winding lane that feels more like a European alleyway than a Manhattan thoroughfare. The building itself tells the story of New York's relentless reinvention.

From Silo to Stage

In 1817, when the structure was first built, Greenwich Village was still semi-rural, and the building served as a farm silo—a cylindrical tower for storing grain. This fact alone is worth pausing over. The Cherry Lane Theatre, that bastion of avant-garde performance, began its existence holding wheat or corn, probably from the farms that once dotted what is now some of the most expensive real estate on Earth.

Over the following century, the building passed through a series of unglamorous incarnations. It became a brewery, taking advantage of the Dutch and German immigrants who brought their beer-making traditions to New York. Later it served as a tobacco warehouse, and then a box factory. Each transformation reflected the neighborhood's evolution from farmland to industrial hub.

Then came 1923, and a group of artists decided that this battered old structure might make a theater.

The conversion was led by four people whose names deserve to be better remembered: Evelyn Vaughn, William S. Rainey, Reginald Travers, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. That last name might ring a bell. Millay was already becoming one of the most celebrated poets in America, famous for verses that captured the heady rebellion of the Jazz Age. Her involvement with the Cherry Lane speaks to the creative ferment of 1920s Greenwich Village, when poets and playwrights and painters all inhabited the same cramped apartments and smoke-filled cafés.

They christened their creation the Cherry Lane Playhouse, and it opened its doors to its first reviewed production in February 1924: a play called Saturday Night by Robert Presnell. The theater was tiny—it remains tiny today, with only 179 seats on its main stage and another 60 in its studio space. But in the world of experimental theater, small is often beautiful. Small means intimate. Small means risks are possible.

The Absurdist Era

To understand what the Cherry Lane became, you need to understand a movement called the Theatre of the Absurd. This was a loose grouping of playwrights who emerged in the 1950s, primarily in France, who shared a conviction that traditional drama failed to capture the essential strangeness of human existence. The term itself comes from Albert Camus, the French-Algerian philosopher who argued that life is fundamentally absurd—not in the sense of being funny, but in the sense of being without inherent meaning.

The absurdists didn't write plays with neat plots and satisfying resolutions. They wrote plays where two tramps wait endlessly for someone who never arrives. They wrote plays where characters are buried up to their necks in sand. They wrote plays where the furniture multiplies until it crowds the actors off the stage. These works were bewildering, often frustrating, and yet they captured something true about the mid-century condition—the trauma of world wars, the creeping suspicion that progress might be an illusion, the loneliness of modern life.

The Cherry Lane became one of the premier American venues for this work.

Samuel Beckett's Happy Days had its world premiere there on September 17, 1961. This is the play with the woman buried in sand—first to her waist in Act One, then to her neck in Act Two—who nonetheless chatters away with relentless optimism about the beautiful day. Beckett, an Irishman living in Paris who wrote in French and then translated his own work into English, had already scandalized and delighted audiences with Waiting for Godot. The Cherry Lane gave Americans their first chance to see his next major statement.

The American premiere of Endgame had opened at the Cherry Lane three years earlier, in January 1958. Directed by Alan Schneider, who became the foremost American interpreter of Beckett's work, it starred Alvin Epstein and Lester Rawlins. Endgame is even bleaker than Godot—a play set in a room that might be the last habitable space on a dying Earth, where a blind tyrant in a wheelchair torments his servant while his legless parents live in trash cans. It's exactly the sort of thing that wouldn't have a prayer on Broadway, and exactly the sort of thing the Cherry Lane existed to champion.

The Living Theatre

The absurdists weren't the only radicals to find a home at Commerce Street. In 1951 and 1952, the Cherry Lane housed The Living Theatre, one of the most influential experimental theater companies of the twentieth century.

Founded by Julian Beck and Judith Malina, The Living Theatre rejected the passive spectatorship of conventional drama. They wanted to abolish the invisible wall between performers and audience. They wanted theater that provoked, that challenged, that potentially changed lives. In later years, they would stage productions where audience members might be grabbed, confronted, even undressed. Their most famous piece, Paradise Now, ended with the entire company and willing audience members marching naked into the street.

But in those early Cherry Lane years, they were still developing their approach, staging works that were adventurous without being quite so confrontational. One remarkable production was Desire Caught by the Tail, a play written by Pablo Picasso. Yes, that Picasso—the painter of Guernica and the inventor of Cubism. He had dashed off this surrealist comedy during the Nazi occupation of Paris, and it had been read aloud at a gathering that included Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. The Cherry Lane gave Americans the chance to see it staged.

This was the spirit of the place: anything might happen. An evening might bring a play by Picasso. Or a performance by a young folk singer named Bob Dylan. Or Pete Seeger, that tall man with the banjo who had been blacklisted during the McCarthy era and would later lead a quarter million people in singing "We Shall Overcome" at the March on Washington.

The Parade of Names

Looking back at the Cherry Lane's history is like reading a roster of twentieth-century literary greatness. The names accumulate in a dizzying procession, each one representing a distinct voice, a particular vision of what theater could accomplish.

In the 1920s, when the theater was new, productions included works by F. Scott Fitzgerald (who is remembered for his novels but tried his hand at plays), John Dos Passos (whose experimental trilogy U.S.A. would later influence generations of writers), and Elmer Rice (whose The Adding Machine was an early expressionist masterpiece). The 1940s brought Eugene O'Neill, the only American playwright to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, along with the Irish firebrand Seán O'Casey, the Group Theatre veteran Clifford Odets, the poet W. H. Auden, the endlessly innovative Gertrude Stein, the Italian master of theatrical trickery Luigi Pirandello, and the Armenian-American William Saroyan, who refused the Pulitzer Prize because he didn't believe in patronage of the arts.

The 1950s continued this embarrassment of riches: Beckett, Picasso, T. S. Eliot (known primarily as a poet but also the author of Murder in the Cathedral), the French dramatist Jean Anouilh, and Tennessee Williams, whose A Streetcar Named Desire had redefined American drama. The 1960s brought Harold Pinter, the British master of menacing pauses and unspoken threats; LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), the central figure in the Black Arts Movement; Eugène Ionesco, whose The Bald Soprano was the quintessential absurdist comedy; the young Terrence McNally; Lanford Wilson; and Lorraine Hansberry, whose A Raisin in the Sun had been the first play by a Black woman produced on Broadway.

Edward Albee deserves special mention. The author of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? staged a large number of his plays at the Cherry Lane, and maintained a decades-long relationship with the theater. In later years, he would serve as what the theater called the "Mentor's Mentor," attending readings and conducting master classes for young playwrights.

The 1970s and 1980s brought Sam Shepard, Joe Orton, and David Mamet—three wildly different voices united only by their refusal to write conventional well-made plays. Shepard was the cowboy poet, obsessed with the mythology and decay of the American West. Orton was the British enfant terrible, whose dark comedies scandalized audiences until his murder at the hands of his lover in 1967. Mamet was the Chicago tough, whose staccato dialogue captured the rhythms of salesmen, con artists, and desperate men.

Shepard's True West premiered at the Cherry Lane on October 17, 1982, with a cast that now seems impossibly perfect: John Malkovich and Gary Sinise, two actors from Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre who would both go on to major film careers. True West is a play about two brothers—one a screenwriter, one a drifter—who gradually exchange identities over the course of a long night of drinking and destruction. It's become one of the most frequently revived American plays of the late twentieth century, and it was born on Commerce Street.

The Rockefeller Connection

The Cherry Lane's physical space underwent a significant transformation in 1954, and the circumstances are wonderfully strange. Rockefeller Center, that Art Deco cathedral to capitalism in midtown Manhattan, had included a theater called the Center Theatre. It was a massive space, seating over 3,500 people, and it had hosted everything from ice shows to concerts to movie premieres.

But by the early 1950s, the Center Theatre was failing. The economics didn't work; the space was too large, too expensive to operate. In 1954, Rockefeller Center made the decision to demolish it and replace it with an office building.

The theater was gutted and its expensive furnishings sold off. And somehow, the tiny Cherry Lane—less than a twentieth of the Center Theatre's size—managed to acquire much of this material. Suddenly this former grain silo was appointed with fixtures that had originally been designed for a midtown palace. It's the theatrical equivalent of a cottage outfitted with chandeliers from Versailles.

New Ownership, New Challenges

The Cherry Lane has always operated on the edge of financial viability. That's the nature of experimental theater; by definition, it doesn't prioritize commercial appeal. But the 1990s brought new energy and new challenges.

In 1996, Angelina Fiordellisi purchased the theater and its building for $1.7 million—a price that seems almost quaint by today's Manhattan standards. She then invested another $3 million in renovations. That same year, she and Susann Brinkley co-founded the Cherry Lane Theatre Company, and the following year they established the Cherry Lane Alternative, a venue for even more experimental work.

The most notable initiative was the Mentor Project, launched in 1998. This program paired established dramatists with aspiring playwrights in one-on-one mentoring relationships. Each mentor would work with a young writer to develop a single play over the course of a season, culminating in a production. The list of mentors reads like an honor roll of American drama: Pulitzer Prize winners David Auburn, Charles Fuller, Tony Kushner, Marsha Norman, Alfred Uhry, Jules Feiffer, and Wendy Wasserstein; Pulitzer nominees A. R. Gurney, David Henry Hwang, Craig Lucas, and Theresa Rebeck; Obie Award winners Ed Bullins and Lynn Nottage.

The Obie Awards, by the way, are the Off-Broadway equivalent of the Tonys, named after their origin in the Village Voice (OB for Off-Broadway). They've been given out since 1956, and the Cherry Lane has been associated with numerous winners over the decades.

But even with this artistic prestige, financial reality kept asserting itself. In July 2010, the Cherry Lane announced a one-year hiatus in an effort to address mounting debt. The theater went dark. For a venue that had operated continuously since 1923, this was a significant crisis.

Fiordellisi later described receiving hundreds of phone calls, emails, and visits from people concerned about the theater's future. When these supporters began referring rentals to the Cherry Lane—other theater companies looking for a space to stage their work—the financial picture improved. By August 2011, the theater had worked off almost all its debt, and the Mentor Project resumed in February 2012.

A24 and the Future

The next chapter in the Cherry Lane's story involves a company that many readers will associate not with theater but with film. A24 has become one of the most celebrated independent film studios of the past decade, responsible for critically acclaimed movies including Moonlight, Lady Bird, Everything Everywhere All at Once, and Hereditary. The company has cultivated a distinctive brand: adventurous, artistically ambitious, cool.

In 2021, the Cherry Lane went up for sale. Initially, the Lucille Lortel Foundation—named after another legendary Off-Broadway producer—announced it would purchase the theater. But the deal fell through due to price disputes, and the building was placed back on the market for nearly $13 million.

In March 2023, A24 partnered with Taurus Investment Holdings, a global private equity real estate firm, to purchase the Cherry Lane from Fiordellisi for a little over $10 million. This marked A24's first significant expansion into live theater, a signal that the company sees stage work as a natural extension of its film and television operations.

The acquisition raised questions. Would A24 maintain the Cherry Lane's identity as a venue for experimental work? Would the emphasis shift toward productions that might eventually become films? Would the spirit of Beckett and The Living Theatre survive in a building owned by a company that also produced horror movies and prestige dramas?

A24 indicated it would retain the Cherry Lane as a live-theater venue, and following renovations, announced in mid-2025 that the theater would reopen that September. The modifications included upgrades to equipment, seating, and the lobby. The new Cherry Lane would have 167 seats—slightly fewer than its previous 179, but still intimate, still the kind of space where an actor's whisper can reach the back row.

A24 also built a restaurant called Wild Cherry in connection with the theater, hiring the operators of Frenchette—one of the most acclaimed restaurants in Manhattan—to run it. This is perhaps the most telling detail about the Cherry Lane's transformation. In 1923, the neighborhood was bohemian, affordable, a place where artists could survive on very little. Today, Greenwich Village is one of the most expensive neighborhoods in one of the most expensive cities in the world. A dinner at a Frenchette-operated restaurant before a show is a different experience than catching Bob Dylan at a converted silo for the price of a couple beers.

The Ghosts of Commerce Street

Walking down Commerce Street today, you might not immediately recognize the Cherry Lane as anything special. It's a modest brick building on a quiet block, easy to miss if you're not looking for it. The street curves unexpectedly, a remnant of the colonial-era property lines that preceded Manhattan's rigid grid. In summer, the trees provide shade. In winter, the street feels hushed, almost secretive.

Inside, if you close your eyes, you can almost summon the ghosts. There's Beckett's Winnie, buried in her mound, holding up her toothbrush and declaring that this will have been another happy day. There's Shepard's Austin and Lee, trashing the kitchen as their sibling rivalry spirals into something primal. There's the young Dylan, probably nervous, probably defiant, singing songs that would later become anthems.

And further back, before any of them, there are the ghosts of the building's other lives. The brewers tending their vats. The tobacco workers sorting leaves. The box makers cutting and folding cardboard. The farmers, at the very beginning, storing their grain in a round tower on what was then the edge of a small village far from the bustle of downtown Manhattan.

The Cherry Lane Theatre is a palimpsest—a surface on which successive generations have written and rewritten, each layer partially visible beneath the next. It's survived because it kept adapting, kept finding new purposes, kept attracting people who believed that small spaces could contain large ideas. Whether under A24's ownership it will maintain this tradition remains to be seen. But for more than a century now, this peculiar little building has been proving that you don't need a Broadway budget or a Broadway-sized theater to make theatrical history.

You just need the right converted grain silo and the courage to put on something strange.