Cherry Lane Theatre
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The Cherry Lane Theatre, located at 38 Commerce Street in the borough of Manhattan, is New York City's oldest, continuously running off-Broadway theater.
A landmark in Greenwich Village’s cultural landscape, it was built as a farm silo in 1817, and also served as a tobacco warehouse and box factory before Edna St. Vincent Millay and other members of the Provincetown Players converted the structure into a theatre they christened the Cherry Lane Playhouse, which opened on March 24, 1924 with the play The Man Who Ate the Popomack. The Living Theatre, Theatre of the Absurd, and the Downtown Theater movement all took root there, and it developed a reputation as a place where aspiring playwrights and emerging voices could showcase their work.
In 1985 and 1986, the Light Opera of Manhattan produced a 52-week per year stream of light opera and Gilbert and Sullivan, but the house was too small for the company.
In 1996, Angelina Fiordellisi revitalized Cherry Lane Theatre and within a year founded a resident non-profit company. Her aim is to sustain a community of playwrights and supporting theater artists, both seasoned and new, who provide a social mirror for a diverse, multigenerational audience with their work, much of it experimental in nature.
Notable productions staged there include Claudia Shear's Blown Sideways Through Life, Fortune's Fool with Alan Bates and Frank Langella, The Sum of Us with Tony Goldwyn, the Richard Maltby, Jr.-David Shire musical Closer Than Ever, Sam Shepard's True West, Joe Orton's Entertaining Mr. Sloane, Edward Albee's The Zoo Story, Stephen Schwartz's Godspell, Paul Osborn's Morning's at Seven, and the long-running phenomenon Nunsense.
