Cherry Lane Theatre
A small Off-Broadway stage that put on Beckett, Albee, Pinter and Shepard
The story
Before you is the Cherry Lane Theatre. The theater itself says that in 1817 a farm silo stood on this spot. The present brick building went up in 1836 as Alexander McLachlan’s brewery. Later it was a tobacco warehouse, and then a box factory. In 1924, friends of the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay brought in the stage designer Cleon Throckmorton. He turned the factory into a theater, and it was named the Cherry Lane. The theater likes to recall that in 1930 The New York Times called it the smallest stage in town. The theater considers itself the oldest Off-Broadway theater. That is the name for New York’s small stages outside the big Broadway houses. In the 1920s it staged Fitzgerald and Dos Passos, and later O’Neill, Gertrude Stein and T. S. Eliot. In the early 1950s the experimental company The Living Theatre performed here. In the 1960s came plays by Beckett, Albee, Pinter and Ionesco. On the seventeenth of September 1961, Samuel Beckett’s “Happy Days” had its American premiere here. And in 1982 the famous production of Sam Shepard’s “True West” played here, with John Malkovich and Gary Sinise. Barbra Streisand, Gene Hackman and James Earl Jones all acted in productions on this stage. In 2023 the theater was bought by a film studio together with investors. The studio promised to keep it a live stage, and it kept its word: after a renovation the theater reopened in September 2025. The main house has one hundred sixty-seven seats.
Visiting
38 Commerce Street, West Village. Subway: the 1 train to Christopher Street, or the A, B, C, D, E, F or M to West 4th Street. You can only go inside for a show: tickets at cherrylanetheatre.org, doors open half an hour before, and there is no late seating. The facade can be seen from the street at any time.
Sources
- Cherry Lane Theatre — History (archived page, 2020)
- Cherry Lane Theatre — FAQ
- Cherry Lane Theatre — About
- NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission — Greenwich Village Historic District Designation Report
- Wikipedia — Cherry Lane Theatre
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