Cherry Lane's Fiordellisi to Step Down as Artistic Director in 2011

According to the NY Times, Cherry Lane Theatre's Angelina Fiordellisi, will resign as Artistic Director sometime between March and June of 2011.  Additionally, Fiodellisi plans to sell the building, which has been a Greenwich Village staple since 1924, due to ongoing financial struggles.

Fiordellisi, who has been with the historic theatre since 1996, told NYT, "It's frightening to me, what's happened to Off Broadway theater. I feel that we can longer do theater for the sake of the art form. We have to adhere to the formula of having a film star in our productions to sell tickets because it's so financially prohibitive. I don't want to do theater like that."

To read the full article, click here.

The Cherry Lane Theatre, located at 38 Commerce Street in Manhattan, is New York City's oldest, continuously running off-Broadway theater.

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 theatre they christened the Cherry Lane Playhouse, which opened on March 24, 1924, with the play, The Man Who Ate the Popomack. 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 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, John Dos Passos, and Elmer Rice in the 1920s; Eugene O'Neill, Sean O'Casey, Clifford Odets, W. H. Auden, Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, Pablo Picasso and William Saroyan in the 1940s/50s; Beckett, Edward Albee, Harold Pinter, Eugene Ionesco and LeRoi Jones in the 60s; and Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson, Joe Orton and David Mamet in the 1970s/80s.

Playhouse productions featured an equally illustrious group of actors and directors, including John Malkovich, Barbra Streisand, RoBert Walker, 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, Franchot 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.

In 1996, Artistic Director Angelina Fiordellisi revitalized Cherry Lane Theatre and within a year founded a resident non-profit company. Her aim is to sustain a community of playwrights and supporting theater artists, both seasoned and new, who provide a social mirror for a diverse, multigenerational audience with their work, much of it experimental in nature.

In 1998, she, along with playwright Michael Weller and Susann Brinkley, founded the company's Mentor Project, which matches pre-eminent 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.

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