Trial by Fire with Edward Albee

In 1962, “Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” opened on Broadway and made Edward Albee money. He and his producers, Richard Barr and Clinton Wilder, spent it downtown. In 1963 they opened the Playwrights Unit Workshop at the Village South Theatre.

The method was trial by fire. Where other development programs favored readings and closed workshops, the Unit gave untested writers full productions in front of paying strangers, and let the work survive or not on its own terms. Albee's own account of the difference between uptown and down: “People go to Broadway to look, they come Off-Broadway to listen.”

What came out of those seven years reads like a theater syllabus. Terrence McNally, Sam Shepard, John Guare, Lanford Wilson, A.R. Gurney and Adrienne Kennedy all had early work staged here. In 1964 the Unit produced “Dutchman” — a taut, furious allegory of race in America built around an encounter on a subway car, and the last play its author published as LeRoi Jones before he became Amiri Baraka.

In 1968 Mart Crowley's “The Boys in the Band” premiered on this stage: a group of gay friends at a birthday party, written without flinching at a time when homosexuality remained criminal in most of the country. The Stonewall uprising broke out not far north during its original run.

The Unit left 15 Vandam in 1970. The last production under the Village South name was the musical “Who's Happy Now?”