CHERRY LANE ALTERNATIVE

Entering its 30th season, Cherry Lane Alternative (CLA) has spent three decades championing playwrights and producing new work, making it one of New York’s longest-running nonprofit Off-Broadway organizations devoted to new play development. Founded in 1997 upon Angelina Fiordellisi’s revival of the historic Cherry Lane Theatre, CLA has become an enduring steward of new work, cultivating the artistic relationships that shape the future of American theatre.

From its founding, CLA has been guided by a simple belief: lasting work requires time and trust. The organization creates space for playwrights and their collaborators to take creative risks and to discover, in rehearsal and in the presence of an audience, what a play is still becoming.

CLA’s artistic legacy includes the Obie Award-winning Mentor Project and the Tongues reading series. Launched in 1998 and named for Joseph Chaikin and Sam Shepard’s play of the same name, Tongues has hosted more than 300 readings of original plays. CLA’s master classes have engaged some of the most exciting artists in American theatre, from playwrights and directors to producers and designers, beginning with Edward Albee in 2000 and continuing with David Henry Hwang and Marsha Norman in the years since. The Mentor Project alone has supported nearly 70 playwrights, including Anne Washburn, Katori Hall, Rajiv Joseph, Jocelyn Bioh, and Jen Silverman, many of whom have returned to mentor the next generation, carrying that tradition forward on Broadway and regional stages throughout the country.

Edward Albee, CLA’s Founding Mentor, captured the organization’s purpose best:

“What the Cherry Lane Alternative is doing is so exciting. Most important, I think, is the mentoring program of young playwrights. It is the mentoring program which will allow us to have an important theatrical future.”

The way an artist is welcomed into a room shapes what they are able to make once inside it. By investing not only in new plays, but in the people and relationships that bring them to life, CLA sustains the artistic community upon which lasting theatre depends.

That commitment has always extended beyond CLA’s own productions. Through its Company-in-Residence program, CLA gave companies like LAByrinth Theater Company and Miranda Theatre Company a home in which to produce, recognizing that a vibrant theatrical landscape depends on artists and institutions supporting one another. During a pause in its own producing activity, CLA continued this work through collaboration and support offered behind the scenes.

Today, as an independent institution under Artistic Director Mary Geerlof, CLA enters a new chapter, expanding its producing activities while strengthening its role as an artistic home for playwrights, theatre makers, and smaller companies.

Cherry Lane Alternative remains committed to creating the conditions in which artists can bring new plays to life, guided by the conviction that has shaped the organization from the beginning: the most important plays have not yet been written.