A landmark in Greenwich Village's cultural landscape, Cherry Lane Theatre serves as a lab for the development of new American works. As New York's oldest, continuously running Off-Broadway theatre, the Cherry Lane has helped to define American drama, fostering theater that is fresh, darin, and relevant, for over 80 years.

CHERRY LANE THEATRE at 38 Commerce Street was originally the site of a silo on the Gomez Farm in 1817. The building that now stands was erected in 1836 as a brewery, and later served as a tobacco warehouse and eventually box factory.

In 1924, a group of artists, all colleagues of Edna St. Vincent Millay, commissioned famed scenic designer Cleon Throckmorton to convert the box factory into the theater called Cherry Lane Playhouse. It fueled some of the most courageous experiments in the chronicles of the American stage. The Downtown Theater movement, The Living Theatre, and Theatre of the Absurd all took root at the lively Playhouse, and it proved fertile ground for scores of the twenieth-century's seminal theatrical voices.

A staggering succession of plays have streamed out of the small edifice. Works by a decades-spanning parade of writers whose names have lent brilliance and distinction to the American and international literary and theatrical treasuries. They include F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dos Passo, and Elmer Rice in the 20s; O’Neill, O’Casey, Odets, Auden, Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, Picasso and William Saroyan in the 40s and 50s; Beckett, Albee, Pinter, Ionesco and LeRoi Jones in the 60s; and Shepard, Lanford Wilson, Joe Orton and Mamet in the 70s and 80s.

Playhouse productions featured an equally illustrious group of actors and directors, including John Malkovich, Barbra Streisand, Geraldine Fitzgerald, James Earl Jones, Ruby Dee, Gene Hackman, Bea Arthur (making her stage debut), Fritz Weaver, Judith Malina, Burl Ives, Colleen Dewhurst, Harvey Keitel, Cicely Tyson, Jerry Stiller, James Coco, Dolores Sutton, Shami Chaikin, James Broderick, Lee Strasberg, Roger Bart, Francot Tone, Roscoe Lee Browne, Alan Schneider, Claudia Shear, Anne Revere, Theodore Bikel, Peter Falk, Estelle Parsons, Judd Hirsch, Judith Ivey, Robert Wilson, Maxwell Caulfield, Adolf Green and Betty Comden, Alvin Epstein, Rue McClanahan, Shirley Knight, John Tillinger, Lewis Black, Sudie Bond, Tom Bosley (who also worked in the theater’s box office), Frances Sternhagen, Roy Scheider, James Noble, Geraldine Page, Mark Setlock, Gene Saks, Bob Dylan, F. Murray Abraham, Kiki & Herb, Jo Ann Worley, Joan Micklin Silver, John Rando, Gary Sinise, Vincent Gardenia, Micki Grant, Tony Musante, Rainn Wilson, Kevin Bacon, Kim Stanley, Frank Langella, Tyne Daly, John Epperson, Nancy Marchand, Robert Loggia, Dennis Quaid, Joan Cusack and Joseph Chaikin.

Production History: 1920-1959

Production History: 1960-1979

Production History: 1980-1999

Production History: 2000-present