The brickwork of Greenwich Village has always been a canvas—painted with smoke, protest, and verse. In the quiet folds of Commerce Street stands a building that has outlived speakeasies, rent strikes, and revolutions of thought. The Cherry Lane Theatre, an unassuming chapel of the avant-garde, began its life in the 19th century not as a theater, but as a brewery—then a box factory. By the 1920s, it began to change—not into a cathedral, but a stage.
It was 1923, the dawn of a seismic decade. Prohibition had officially pressed a finger to the nation’s lips, but Greenwich Village did not shush so easily. The Cherry Lane Playhouse was officially born that year, repurposed from the industrial bones of the building by a group of artists determined to make something live where things had only ever been built.
Edna St. Vincent Millay was already a national treasure at the time. Her poetry burned through the Village like a lantern in fog. She lived a block away, in the narrowest house in Manhattan, a sliver of brick on Bedford Street—a perfect symbol of her navigation of a world not yet ready for her prescriptions. “Vincent,” as she insisted people call her in honor of the hospital that saved her mother and brother, was already famous—a Pulitzer Prize winner and the embodiment of the modern woman: sharp-tongued and uncontainable.
She haunted the cafés and salons where the idea of Cherry Lane was fermenting—places like Polly’s, the Liberal Club, and the Provincetown Playhouse. The founders of Cherry Lane, including Evelyn Vaughn and poet-actress Bertha Ten Eyck James (a friend of Millay), imagined a space where young playwrights could try out radical, intimate, even incendiary work. Millay’s fingerprints—her politics, her lyric fire, her utter disdain for anything resembling bourgeois convention—were all over it.
In the early days, the theater’s programming embraced risk. One-act plays by Eugene O’Neill, Djuna Barnes, and Gertrude Stein found a home here. The audiences were small but electric, composed of beatniks, wanderers, and visionaries who believed in speaking truth to power.
Barbra Streisand was one such visionary—though no one recognized it at first.
In 1957, at 15 years old, Streisand stood on the stage of Cherry Lane. She was, in her teens, nearly homeless, renting a cold apartment in Brooklyn, sleeping on couches. The Cherry Lane, modest as it was, became the first place in Manhattan where she heard applause.
Years earlier, another rising star had crossed the same creaky floorboards: Cary Grant.
Before he was Cary Grant, he was Archibald Leach, a British acrobat-turned-actor with a recognizable jawline and a gift for physical comedy. In the early 1930s, Grant performed at the Cherry Lane in several Off-Broadway productions, testing his dramatic chops in intimate, improvisational plays. The space, stripped of glitz, forced him to rely not on charm but on craft. Through the decades, the Cherry Lane Theatre has worn many masks. In the 1950s, it hosted Edward Albee’s early work—The Zoo Story, The American Dream. Pablo Picasso’s Desire Caught by the Tail (French: Le Désir attrapé par la queue) was presented at the Cherry Lane Theatre as part of An Evening of Bohemian Theatre on March 2, 1952.In the ’60s and ’70s, it became a hub for experimental drama, giving voice to social unrest. In the ’90s, Broadway actress Angelina Fiordellisi bought the theater and turned it into a nonprofit, creating programs for young playwrights—echoes of what it had always been: a greenhouse for the wild and untried.
Years later, in 2001, another electric presence took the Cherry Lane stage: John Malkovich. Known for his cerebral intensity and coiled performances, Malkovich starred in The Giacomo Variations, a genre-blurring production that combined theater with opera and chamber music. Malkovich, already a titan of stage and screen, found the Cherry Lane’s pared-down aesthetic liberating. In interviews, Malkovich spoke of his affinity for Off-Broadway venues that let the text do the work. Cherry Lane was one of the few places left, he said, where you could still feel the audience breathe.
What unites these artists—Millay, Streisand, Grant, Picasso, and Malkovich—is their lack of interest in safety. Millay’s plays, like Aria da Capo, disguised political critique in lyrical masks. Streisand turned torch songs into protest anthems. Grant, in his youth, took risks that hinted at the complexity he would later conceal behind a wry smile. Picasso, on and off stage, shattered form to reveal truth. And Malkovich leaned into discomfort, trusting audiences to come with him.
Inside this 179-seat sanctuary, you can still feel it. The memories of Streisand’s velvet vibrato and Grant’s elegance rise. You could sit in the back row and imagine them all meeting—Millay quoting Renascence, Streisand humming “Happy Days Are Here Again,” Grant adjusting his cuffs before stepping onstage, Malkovich muttering lines to himself, and Picasso sketching.
Outside, Greenwich Village keeps moving—more expensive now, more polished—but the Cherry Lane remains stubbornly intimate. No neon marquee. No velvet ropes. Just a plain door on a crooked street, guarding something timeless.
