The ANTA Washington Square Theatre was a small theatre located on 40 West 4th St., in Greenwich Village, in New York City, and run by the American National Theater and Academy (ANTA). The theater was located away from the mainstream Broadway district, and was originally designed as a prototype for the Vivian Beaumont Theatre. Demolished in 1968, it used a thrust stage tilted toward the audience, with the audience sitting on three sides of it. It did not employ the use of a curtain.
Several highly regarded plays had their runs at their ANTA Washington Square. Among the most notable were the original productions of Arthur Miller's plays After the Fall and Incident at Vichy, and the 1964 revival of Eugene O'Neill's Marco Millions, starring Hal Holbrook as Marco Polo and David Wayne as Kublai Khan. [1] Quite likely, the most famous show ever to play at the ANTA Washington Square was the smash hit musical Man of La Mancha, which began its first New York run there on November 22, 1965 and transferred to the more conventional Martin Beck Theatre in 1968, pending the demolition of the Washington Square Theatre. [2]