On one of the most charming and bucolic streets in the city, you will find the Cherry Lane Theatre. This small, quaint theater at 38 Commerce Street in the West Village is, however, not small in reputation or impact. The building site was originally a silo on the Gomez Farm in 1817 - the building that now stands was first built in 1836 as a brewery and was later used as a tobacco warehouse and box factory. Click here for more photos. It was founded as the Cherry Lane Playhouse in 1924 by a group of colleagues of Edna St. Vincent Millay. The roster of playwrights and actors that have worked there is truly astonishing and voluminous: O'Neill, Beckett, Albee, Pinter, David Mamet, Sam Shepard; John Malkovich, Gene Hackman, Barbra Streisand, James Earl Jones, Rod Steiger, Dennis Quaid, Kevin Bacon, Harvey Keitel, to name just a few. If you are not familiar with this theater, I suggest you peruse their extensive website and learn more about it. As a laboratory for theater with a groundbreaking heritage, it is quite fitting that New York's longest running Off Broadway playhouse is located on a street with a bend and left off the grid of the Commissioners' Plan of 1811...
Thursday, September 21, 2006
Cherry Lane Theatre
On one of the most charming and bucolic streets in the city, you will find the Cherry Lane Theatre. This small, quaint theater at 38 Commerce Street in the West Village is, however, not small in reputation or impact. The building site was originally a silo on the Gomez Farm in 1817 - the building that now stands was first built in 1836 as a brewery and was later used as a tobacco warehouse and box factory. Click here for more photos. It was founded as the Cherry Lane Playhouse in 1924 by a group of colleagues of Edna St. Vincent Millay. The roster of playwrights and actors that have worked there is truly astonishing and voluminous: O'Neill, Beckett, Albee, Pinter, David Mamet, Sam Shepard; John Malkovich, Gene Hackman, Barbra Streisand, James Earl Jones, Rod Steiger, Dennis Quaid, Kevin Bacon, Harvey Keitel, to name just a few. If you are not familiar with this theater, I suggest you peruse their extensive website and learn more about it. As a laboratory for theater with a groundbreaking heritage, it is quite fitting that New York's longest running Off Broadway playhouse is located on a street with a bend and left off the grid of the Commissioners' Plan of 1811...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
6 comments:
Truly astonishing and voluminous indeed.
Endroit magique du village. la rue 'commerce street' fait partie de l'histoire du village.
Very colorful photo! I love it!
This theater has an excellent program staging productions by new playwrights who have been mentored by some big names. Tickets are surprisingly cheap, and the plays are really great!
Aah, don't we just love that NYC, for all it is a throbbing, enormous city, is actually a series of villages and neighbourhoods! I hope as Sydney grows (and grows up) it develops to incorporate this "fel" (but I always find Australian cities and suburbs less "neighbourly" than American, strangely - despite our reputed friendliness, we are not good at local community stuff - probably our history which places the state level at the heart of our polity, rathe rthan the neighbourhood ....???? (I'll stop the junk philosophy now)
Just beautiful building, so charming!
Post a Comment