History
The building was constructed 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 theater they christened the Cherry Lane Playhouse, which opened in 1924 with the theatrical presentation Saturday Night, by Richard Fresnell. This was followed by the plays The Man Who Ate Popmack, by W. J. Turner, directed by Reginald Travers, on March 24, 1924; and The Way of the World by William Congreve and produced by the Cherry Lane Players Inc., opening November 17, 1924.
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.
A succession of major American plays streamed out of the small edifice, by writers including F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, and Elmer Rice in the 1920s; Eugene O'Neill, Sean O'Casey, Clifford Odets, W. H. Auden, Gertrude Stein, Luigi Pirandello, and William Saroyan in the 1940s; Samuel Beckett, Pablo Picasso, T. S. Eliot, Jean Anouilh, and Tennessee Williams in the 1950s; Harold Pinter, LeRoi Jones, Eugène Ionesco, Terrence McNally, Lanford Wilson, and Lorraine Hansberry, in the 1960s, as well as Edward Albee, staging a large number of his plays; and Sam Shepard, Joe Orton and David Mamet in the 1970s and 1980s.
Beckett's Happy Days had its world premiere at the Cherry Lane, directed by Alan Schneider, on September 17, 1961.
From February 1985 until suspending operations in October 1986 after almost 19 years, the year-round Light Opera of Manhattan operetta company was in residence at the Cherry Lane.
Angelina Fiordellisi bought the theater and the building in 1996 for $1.7 million, and renovated it for $3 million. That year, Fiordellisi, as artistic director, Susann Brinkley co-founded the Cherry Lane Theatre Company. The following year, Fiordellisi founded the Cherry Lane Alternative.
In 1998, Fiordellisi, Brinkley, and playwright Michael Weller co-founded the company's Mentor Project, which matches established dramatists with aspiring playwrights in one-to-one mentoring relationships. Each mentor works with a playwright to perfect a single work during the season-long process, which culminates in a showcase production. Participants have included Pulitzer Prize-winners David Auburn, Charles Fuller, Tony Kushner, Marsha Norman, Alfred Uhry, Jules Feiffer, and Wendy Wasserstein, as well as Pulitzer nominees A.R. Gurney, David Henry Hwang (Tony Award, Obie Award), Craig Lucas, Theresa Rebeck, and Obie Award-winners Ed Bullins (three-time winner) and Lynn Nottage, as mentors. From the outset, Edward Albee has participated as the Mentor's Mentor by attending Project readings and performances and conducting a yearly Master Class.
Fiordellisi has founded numerous other programs at the theater, including a Master Class series in 2000.
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