NY Public Library for the Performing Arts Digital Curatorial Assistant Stephen Bowie Uncovers Circle in the Square Photo Archives

BroadwayWorld.com continues our exclusive content series, in collaboration with The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, which delves into the library's unparalleled archives, and resources. Below, check out a piece by Stephen Bowie (Digital Curatorial Assistant for The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts) on the Circle in the Square photo archives:

In 1951, two young, recently married portrait photographers took an evening stroll and Greenwich Village and happened upon a new performance space in Sheridan Square. Noticing that the theatre had no photographs on display to advertise its initial productions, Justin and Barbara Kerr went inside and offered their services for free. One of the theatre's founders, Theodore Mann, happily agreed, and the Kerrs returned to take photos of the first eight productions of the Circle in the Theatre.

More than five decades later, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts acquired the Circle in the Square's archives. Last year, the Library completed a project to digitize the Circle's photograph collection, as well as selected texts and scenic designs. More than 1,000 photographs from the Circle archives - representing the work of prominent photographers including Kenn Duncan, Angus McBean, Hugh Bell, and Inge Morath, as well as Friedman-Abeles and Martha Swope -- who shot the majority of the Circle shows during the 1960s and'70s-'80s, respectively -- are now available on NYPL's Digital Collections website.

The Kerrs' photographs captured Geraldine Page, the Circle's breakout star, in Summer and Smoke, a revival of the Tennessee Williams play that put the theater on the map after critic Brooks Atkinson wrote about it in The New York Times. The other defining Circle production - the 1956 mounting of A Long Day's Journey Into Night, which established Jose Quintero and actor Jason Robards as the stage's foremost interpreters of Eugene O'Neill - is also represented in the collection, mainly by unidentified photographers.

Other photographs in the Circle's archives offer rare glimpses of the theatre's original environs at 5 Sheridan Square. One image shows the audience at an early performance, seated around the tiny tables that dotted the small space; because the Sheridan Square building was zoned as a cabaret rather than a theater, Mann had to maintain the pretext that food was served during performances. In 1972, the Circle moved into a new space at 50th and Broadway, still a theater in the round but much more polished.

As a Broadway theater, Circle in the Square became more dependent on star-driven revivals - the inspired pairing of a titanic talent with the right material. (One name Mann pursued fervently for years was Paul Newman, who never bit, although Mann did get Newman's wife, Joanne Woodward, to headline a 1981 version of Candida.) For many of Circle's early Broadway outings, the photos in the Library's collections are the only visual record of some legendary performances, such as George C. Scott as Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, or James Earl Jones as Hickey in The Iceman Cometh. Behind-the-scenes shots show the directors at work, too: Stephen Porter directing Days in the Trees; Tony Richardson directing his wife, Vanessa Redgrave, in The Lady From the Sea; George C. Scott directing his wife, Trish Van Devere, in All God's Chillun Got Wings; and of course Jose Quintero (during rehearsals for Yerma) and Ted Mann (during rehearsals for Pal Joey).

It's also a great collection to browse through in search of actors who later became familiar faces in other media, whether it be Peter Boyle or Fred Willard or John Lithgow or nine-year-old Sarah Michelle Gellar. In the late '80s, Sons of Anarchy's Kim Coates played Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, while Beth Fowler - now visible as Sister Jane in Orange Is the New Black - played Mrs. Lovett in a revival of Sweeney Todd, Circle's only Sondheim production.

Even though it became famous as, and indeed synonymous with, the Off-Broadway movement, Circle in the Square wasn't immune to the financial troubles that plague many theaters. When times were especially tough, one of Mann's ways of cutting costs was to order only a few prints from the contact sheets the photographers submitted - the bare minimum he needed to publicize a show. (Famed photojournalist Inge Morath photographed most of the 1975-76 seasons, but Mann complained that her rates were too high and the theater stopped working with her.) In more flush periods, two or three dozen pictures was the norm - and all of those are now preserved in the Library's Circle in the Square Papers.

Photo Credit: Deborah Feingold/Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library