The Lights Come Up

In 1994 the lights came up on a live stage again, and the room took the name it still carries. “Grandma Sylvia's Funeral,” an interactive comedy about death, family conflict and remembrance, opened SoHo Playhouse and ran past its thousandth performance. In 1998, Killer Joe was revived here with Scott Glenn, Amanda Plummer and Michael Shannon. Its producer was a man named Darren Lee Cole.

Cole took over the lease in 2004 and opened his tenure with “Uncle Jacques' Symphony,” a one-man show about the music inside ordinary life. In 2007 he launched the International Fringe Encore Series, which brings the strongest work from the world's Fringe festivals to New York for an extended Off-Broadway run, a pipeline that has defined the theater ever since. In March 2019, Phoebe Waller-Bridge's “Fleabag” had its American premiere on this stage. It sold out before she performed a single night and extended its run by demand.

The work has kept arriving. “Job,” with Peter Friedman and Sydney Lemmon. Ed Byrne's “Tragedy Plus Time.” Florencia Iriondo's “South.” In 2023, “Lighthouse: An Immersive Drinking Musical” became the longest-running production in the building's history.

Two hundred years on, the arrangement is roughly what it has always been. New works still get tested in front of strangers where the Tammany men drank, which is the only test that has ever counted.