Cherry Lane Theatre
Encyclopedia
The Cherry Lane Theatre (CLT), located at 38 Commerce Street in the borough
of Manhattan
, was New York City
's oldest, continuously running off-Broadway
theater. As of 2010, when its owner and artistic director announced it was closing and the building was to be sold, the Cherry Lane contained a 179-seat main stage and a 60-seat studio.
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
, Eugene Ionesco
, 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.
, Claudia Shear
's Blown Sideways Through Life, Fortune's Fool
with Alan Bates
and Frank Langella
, The Sum of Us
with Tony Goldwyn
, the Richard Maltby, Jr.
-David Shire
musical Closer Than Ever
, Sam Shepard
's True West
, Joe Orton
's Entertaining Mr. Sloane, Edward Albee
's The Zoo Story
, John-Michael Tebelak
's and Stephen Schwartz
's Godspell
, Paul Osborn
's Morning's at Seven
, and the long-running Nunsense
.
In 2008, the theater mounted the return of two historic one-acts as part of its annual Heritage Series: Edward Albee
's The American Dream (first produced at the CLT in 1961 by Richard Barr and Clinton Wilder) and The Sandbox (first produced at CLT in 1962 in a collaboration between producers Richard Barr, Clinton Wilder and playwright Edward Albee). Both starred Judith Ivey
, George Bartenieff and Jesse Williams
. Actress Myra Carter
was forced to withdraw from the production due to illness, and was replaced by actress Lois Markle. The evening was directed by Albee himself on the occasion of his 80th birthday.
The last Cherry Lane production was a 25th-anniversary revival of Nunsense, running June 15 to July 18, 2010.
Playbill August 2011. New York Times, August 2011
Borough
A borough is an administrative division in various countries. In principle, the term borough designates a self-governing township although, in practice, official use of the term varies widely....
of Manhattan
Manhattan
Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...
, was New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
's oldest, continuously running off-Broadway
Off-Broadway
Off-Broadway theater is a term for a professional venue in New York City with a seating capacity between 100 and 499, and for a specific production of a play, musical or revue that appears in such a venue, and which adheres to related trade union and other contracts...
theater. As of 2010, when its owner and artistic director announced it was closing and the building was to be sold, the Cherry Lane contained a 179-seat main stage and a 60-seat studio.
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 MillayEdna St. Vincent Millay
Edna St. Vincent Millay was an American lyrical poet, playwright and feminist. She received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and was known for her activism and her many love affairs. She used the pseudonym Nancy Boyd for her prose work...
and other members of the Provincetown Players
Provincetown Players
The Provincetown Players was an amateur group of writers and artists who, at the early part of the 20th Century, wanted to see a change in American theatre and created a company committed to producing new plays by exclusively American playwrights...
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
The Living Theatre
The Living Theatre is an American theatre company founded in 1947 and based in New York City. It is the oldest experimental theatre group still existing in the U.S...
, 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
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigm writings of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost...
, John Dos Passos
John Dos Passos
John Roderigo Dos Passos was an American novelist and artist.-Early life:Born in Chicago, Illinois, Dos Passos was the illegitimate son of John Randolph Dos Passos , a distinguished lawyer of Madeiran Portuguese descent, and Lucy Addison Sprigg Madison of Petersburg, Virginia. The elder Dos Passos...
, and Elmer Rice
Elmer Rice
Elmer Rice was an American playwright. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his 1929 play, Street Scene.-Early years:...
in the 1920s; Eugene O'Neill
Eugene O'Neill
Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was an American playwright and Nobel laureate in Literature. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into American drama techniques of realism earlier associated with Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish...
, Sean O'Casey
Seán O'Casey
Seán O'Casey was an Irish dramatist and memoirist. A committed socialist, he was the first Irish playwright of note to write about the Dublin working classes.- Early life:...
, Clifford Odets
Clifford Odets
Clifford Odets was an American playwright, screenwriter, socialist, and social protester.-Early life:Odets was born in Philadelphia to Romanian- and Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, Louis Odets and Esther Geisinger, and raised in Philadelphia and the Bronx, New York. He dropped out of high...
, W. H. Auden
W. H. Auden
Wystan Hugh Auden , who published as W. H. Auden, was an Anglo-American poet,The first definition of "Anglo-American" in the OED is: "Of, belonging to, or involving both England and America." See also the definition "English in origin or birth, American by settlement or citizenship" in See also...
, Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein was an American writer, poet and art collector who spent most of her life in France.-Early life:...
, Luigi Pirandello
Luigi Pirandello
Luigi Pirandello was an Italian dramatist, novelist, and short story writer awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934, for his "bold and brilliant renovation of the drama and the stage." Pirandello's works include novels, hundreds of short stories, and about 40 plays, some of which are written...
, and William Saroyan
William Saroyan
William Saroyan was an Armenian American dramatist and author. The setting of many of his stories and plays is the center of Armenian-American life in California in his native Fresno.-Early years:...
in the 1940s; Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...
, Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...
, T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
, Jean Anouilh
Jean Anouilh
Jean Marie Lucien Pierre Anouilh was a French dramatist whose career spanned five decades. Though his work ranged from high drama to absurdist farce, Anouilh is best known for his 1943 play Antigone, an adaptation of Sophocles' Classical drama, that was seen as an attack on Marshal Pétain's...
, and Tennessee Williams
Tennessee Williams
Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams III was an American writer who worked principally as a playwright in the American theater. He also wrote short stories, novels, poetry, essays, screenplays and a volume of memoirs...
in the 1950s; Harold Pinter
Harold Pinter
Harold Pinter, CH, CBE was a Nobel Prize–winning English playwright and screenwriter. One of the most influential modern British dramatists, his writing career spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party , The Homecoming , and Betrayal , each of which he adapted to...
, Eugene Ionesco
Eugène Ionesco
Eugène Ionesco was a Romanian and French playwright and dramatist, and one of the foremost playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd...
, LeRoi Jones, Eugène Ionesco
Eugène Ionesco
Eugène Ionesco was a Romanian and French playwright and dramatist, and one of the foremost playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd...
, Terrence McNally
Terrence McNally
Terrence McNally is an American playwright who has received four Tony Awards, an Emmy, two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Rockefeller Grant, the Lucille Lortel Award, the Hull-Warriner Award, and a citation from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has been a member of the Council of the...
, Lanford Wilson
Lanford Wilson
Lanford Wilson was an American playwright who helped to advance the Off-Off-Broadway theater movement. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1980, was elected in 2001 to the Theater Hall of Fame, and in 2004 was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters...
, and Lorraine Hansberry
Lorraine Hansberry
Lorraine Hansberry was an African American playwright and author of political speeches, letters, and essays...
, in the 1960s, as well as Edward Albee
Edward Albee
Edward Franklin Albee III is an American playwright who is best known for The Zoo Story , The Sandbox , Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? , and a rewrite of the screenplay for the unsuccessful musical version of Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's . His works are considered well-crafted, often...
, staging a large number of his plays; and Sam Shepard
Sam Shepard
Sam Shepard is an American playwright, actor, and television and film director. He is the author of several books of short stories, essays, and memoirs, and received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1979 for his play Buried Child...
, Joe Orton
Joe Orton
John Kingsley Orton was an English playwright.In a short but prolific career lasting from 1964 until his death, he shocked, outraged and amused audiences with his scandalous black comedies...
and David Mamet
David Mamet
David Alan Mamet is an American playwright, essayist, screenwriter and film director.Best known as a playwright, Mamet won a Pulitzer Prize and received a Tony nomination for Glengarry Glen Ross . He also received a Tony nomination for Speed-the-Plow . As a screenwriter, he received Oscar...
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
Light Opera of Manhattan
Light Opera of Manhattan, known as LOOM, was an Off-Broadway repertory theatre company that produced light operas, including the works of Gilbert and Sullivan and European and American operettas, 52 weeks per year, in New York City between 1968 and 1989....
operetta
Operetta
Operetta is a genre of light opera, light in terms both of music and subject matter. It is also closely related, in English-language works, to forms of musical theatre.-Origins:...
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
Michael Weller
Michael Weller is a Brooklyn-based playwright who is best known for his plays Moonchildren and Loose Ends. Weller is one of the founders of the Cherry Lane Theatre's acclaimed Mentor Project, which pairs pre-eminent playwrights with emerging playwrights for a season-long mentorship...
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
Pulitzer Prize
The Pulitzer Prize is a U.S. award for achievements in newspaper and online journalism, literature and musical composition. It was established by American publisher Joseph Pulitzer and is administered by Columbia University in New York City...
-winners David Auburn
David Auburn
David Auburn is an American playwright.He was raised in Ohio and Arkansas. He attended the University of Chicago, where he was a member of Off-Off Campus, and received a degree in English literature....
, Charles Fuller
Charles Fuller
Charles H. Fuller, Jr. is an American playwright, best known for his play, A Soldier's Play, for which he received the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.-Early years:...
, Tony Kushner
Tony Kushner
Anthony Robert "Tony" Kushner is an American playwright and screenwriter. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1993 for his play, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, and co-authored with Eric Roth the screenplay for the 2005 film, Munich.-Life and career:Kushner was born...
, Marsha Norman
Marsha Norman
Marsha Norman is an American playwright, screenwriter, and novelist. She received the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play night, Mother...
, Alfred Uhry
Alfred Uhry
Alfred Fox Uhry is an American playwright, screenwriter, and member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He is one of very few writers to receive an Academy Award, Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize for dramatic writing....
, Jules Feiffer
Jules Feiffer
Jules Ralph Feiffer is an American syndicated cartoonist, most notable for his long-run comic strip titled Feiffer. He has created more than 35 books, plays and screenplays...
, and Wendy Wasserstein
Wendy Wasserstein
Wendy Wasserstein was an American playwright and an Andrew Dickson White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University...
, as well as Pulitzer nominees A.R. Gurney, David Henry Hwang
David Henry Hwang
David Henry Hwang is an American playwright who has risen to prominence as the preeminent Asian American dramatist in the U.S.He was born in Los Angeles, California and was educated at the Yale School of Drama and Stanford University...
(Tony Award
Tony Award
The Antoinette Perry Award for Excellence in Theatre, more commonly known as a Tony Award, recognizes achievement in live Broadway theatre. The awards are presented by the American Theatre Wing and The Broadway League at an annual ceremony in New York City. The awards are given for Broadway...
, Obie Award
Obie Award
The Obie Awards or Off-Broadway Theater Awards are annual awards given by The Village Voice newspaper to theatre artists and groups in New York City...
), Craig Lucas
Craig Lucas
Craig Lucas is an American playwright, screenwriter, theatre director, musical actor, and film director.-Biography:...
, Theresa Rebeck
Theresa Rebeck
Theresa Rebeck is an American playwright, television writer and novelist. Her work has appeared on the Broadway and Off-Broadway stage, in film, and on television. Among her awards are the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award.-Biography:...
, and Obie Award
Obie Award
The Obie Awards or Off-Broadway Theater Awards are annual awards given by The Village Voice newspaper to theatre artists and groups in New York City...
-winners Ed Bullins
Ed Bullins
Ed Bullins is an African American playwright. He was also the Minister of Culture for the Black Panthers. In addition, he has won numerous awards, including the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award and several Obies. He is one of the best known playwrights to come from the Black Arts Movement...
(three-time winner) and Lynn Nottage
Lynn Nottage
Lynn Nottage is an American playwright whose work often deals with the lives of women of African descent, African Americans and women. She was born in Brooklyn and is a graduate of Brown University and the Yale School of Drama. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005, and a MacArthur Genius...
, as mentors. From the outset, Edward Albee
Edward Albee
Edward Franklin Albee III is an American playwright who is best known for The Zoo Story , The Sandbox , Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? , and a rewrite of the screenplay for the unsuccessful musical version of Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's . His works are considered well-crafted, often...
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.
Productions
Productions staged at the Cherry Lane include The Rimers of EldritchThe Rimers of Eldritch
The Rimers of Eldritch is a play by Lanford Wilson. Set in the mid-20th century in Eldritch, Missouri, a decaying Bible Belt town that once was a prosperous coal mining community, it focuses on the murder of aging hermit Skelly by a woman who mistakenly thought he was committing rape when he...
, Claudia Shear
Claudia Shear
Claudia Shear is an American actress and playwright.The Brooklyn-born Shear first came to prominence with her 1994 self-penned solo performance piece Blown Sideways Through Life, which enjoyed a run of 221 performances at the off-Broadway Cherry Lane Theatre and won her an Obie Award and a Drama...
's Blown Sideways Through Life, Fortune's Fool
Fortune's Fool
Fortune's Fool is a play by Ivan Turgenev.-Plot:The setting is a vast Russian country estate where the resident aristocrats and their many servants are jolted out of their tranquility by the arrival of someone from the city, down-on-his-luck Vassily Semyonitch Kuzovkin, whose own property has been...
with Alan Bates
Alan Bates
Sir Alan Arthur Bates CBE was an English actor, who came to prominence in the 1960s, a time of high creativity in British cinema, when he demonstrated his versatility in films ranging from the popular children’s story Whistle Down the Wind to the "kitchen sink" drama A Kind of Loving...
and Frank Langella
Frank Langella
-Early life:Langella, an Italian American, was born in Bayonne, New Jersey, the son of Angelina and Frank A. Langella Sr., a business executive who was the president of the Bayonne Barrel and Drum Company. Langella attended Washington Elementary School and Bayonne High School in Bayonne...
, The Sum of Us
The Sum of Us
The Sum of Us is a play by David Stevens.The plot revolves around the comfortable relationship between widower Harry and his gay son Jeff and their individual searches for the right mate. Harry unconditionally loves his Rugby-playing son, and even takes an active part in Jeff's search for Mr. Right...
with Tony Goldwyn
Tony Goldwyn
Anthony Howard "Tony" Goldwyn is an American actor and director. He portrayed the villain Carl Bruner in Ghost, Colonel Bagley in The Last Samurai, and the voice of the title character of the Disney animated Tarzan.-Early life:...
, the Richard Maltby, Jr.
Richard Maltby, Jr.
Richard Eldridge Maltby, Jr. is an American theatre director and producer, lyricist, and screenwriter. He is also well known as a constructor of cryptic crossword puzzles. He has done this for Harper's Magazine, sometimes in collaboration with E. R...
-David Shire
David Shire
David Lee Shire is an American songwriter and the composer of stage musicals, film and television scores. The soundtrack to the movie The Taking of Pelham 123 and parts of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack such as Night on Disco Mountain, an adaptation of Modest Mussorgsky's Night on Bald...
musical Closer Than Ever
Closer Than Ever
Closer Than Ever is a musical revue in two acts, with words by Richard Maltby, Jr. and music by David Shire. The revue contains no dialogue, and Maltby and Shire have described this show as a "bookless book musical"...
, Sam Shepard
Sam Shepard
Sam Shepard is an American playwright, actor, and television and film director. He is the author of several books of short stories, essays, and memoirs, and received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1979 for his play Buried Child...
's True West
True West (play)
True West is a play by American playwright Sam Shepard. Like most of his works it is inspired by myths of American life and popular culture. The play is a more traditional narrative than most of the plays that Shepard has written.-Plot:...
, Joe Orton
Joe Orton
John Kingsley Orton was an English playwright.In a short but prolific career lasting from 1964 until his death, he shocked, outraged and amused audiences with his scandalous black comedies...
's Entertaining Mr. Sloane, Edward Albee
Edward Albee
Edward Franklin Albee III is an American playwright who is best known for The Zoo Story , The Sandbox , Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? , and a rewrite of the screenplay for the unsuccessful musical version of Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's . His works are considered well-crafted, often...
's The Zoo Story
The Zoo Story
Not to be confused with Zoo Story: Life in the Garden of Captives the book about Lowry Park ZooThe Zoo Story is American playwright Edward Albee's first play; written in 1958 and completed in just three weeks...
, John-Michael Tebelak
John-Michael Tebelak
John-Michael Tebelak was an American playwright and director. He was most famous for creating the musical Godspell based on the Gospel of Saint Matthew. The music was by Stephen Schwartz...
's and Stephen Schwartz
Stephen Schwartz (composer)
Stephen Lawrence Schwartz is an American musical theatre lyricist and composer. In a career spanning over four decades, Schwartz has written such hit musicals as Godspell , Pippin and Wicked...
's Godspell
Godspell
Godspell is a musical by Stephen Schwartz and John-Michael Tebelak. It opened off Broadway on May 17, 1971, and has played in various touring companies and revivals many times since, including a 2011 revival now playing on Broadway...
, Paul Osborn
Paul Osborn
Paul Osborn was an American playwright and screenwriter best known for writing the screen adaptation of East of Eden as well as South Pacific, The Yearling, The World of Suzie Wong and Sayonara....
's Morning's at Seven
Morning's at Seven
Morning's at Seven is a play by Paul Osborn.Its plot focuses on four aging sisters living in a small Midwestern town in 1938, and it deals with ramifications within the family when two of them begin to question their lives and decide to make some changes before it’s too late.The original Broadway...
, and the long-running Nunsense
Nunsense
Nunsense is a musical comedy with a book, music, and lyrics by Dan Goggin. Originating as a line of greeting cards, Goggin expanded the concept into a cabaret that ran for 38 weeks, and eventually into a full-length musical...
.
In 2008, the theater mounted the return of two historic one-acts as part of its annual Heritage Series: Edward Albee
Edward Albee
Edward Franklin Albee III is an American playwright who is best known for The Zoo Story , The Sandbox , Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? , and a rewrite of the screenplay for the unsuccessful musical version of Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's . His works are considered well-crafted, often...
's The American Dream (first produced at the CLT in 1961 by Richard Barr and Clinton Wilder) and The Sandbox (first produced at CLT in 1962 in a collaboration between producers Richard Barr, Clinton Wilder and playwright Edward Albee). Both starred Judith Ivey
Judith Ivey
Judith Lee Ivey is an American actress and director.-Personal life:Ivey was born in El Paso, Texas, the daughter of Dorothy Lee , a teacher, and Nathan Aldean Ivey, a college instructor and dean. She spent 1965-1968 in Dowagiac, Michigan, where she attended Union High School through tenth grade...
, George Bartenieff and Jesse Williams
Jesse Williams
Jesse or Jessie Williams may refer to:*Jesse Williams , American television actor*Jesse Williams , American high jumper*Jesse Williams , Welsh international footballer*Jesse Lynch Williams, author and dramatist...
. Actress Myra Carter
Myra Carter
Myra Carter is an award-winning American actress of stage, screen and television.-Career:Carter is most admired for her work on stage and in particular the works of Edward Albee including the original casts of Three Tall Women and All Over and the revivals of The American Dream and The Sandbox...
was forced to withdraw from the production due to illness, and was replaced by actress Lois Markle. The evening was directed by Albee himself on the occasion of his 80th birthday.
The last Cherry Lane production was a 25th-anniversary revival of Nunsense, running June 15 to July 18, 2010.
Demise
In September 2010, Fiordellisi announced that the theater would cease productions on its main stage for a least a year to cope with a $250,000 deficit she attributed to a drop in income from government and foundation support, ticket sales, and rental fees. On December 21, 2010, she further announced that she would step down the following year and planned to sell the building that houses the Cherry Lane.New Era
In August 2011, Angelina Fiordellisi announced that Cherry Lane Theatre had been able to work off almost all of its debt and plans to produce again in 2012. Fiordellisi had received hundreds of phone calls and emails and visits from people who were concerned to hear that she was leaving and that the theatre was for sale. And when those people started referring rentals to Cherry Lane she was able to look ahead and feel more secure about the theatre's financial future.Playbill August 2011. New York Times, August 2011