In the heart of Greenwich Village, New York City, 133 MacDougal Street, catty corner from Washington Square Park, an old brick façade stands wedged into a taller, much more modern building, part of the NYU campus. It includes words over the doorway that say only, “The Provincetown.”
This single wall is all that’s left of one of the most profound theatrical sites in the country, where modern “American” theater emerged, aspiring to dramatize the lives of working people, democratic and street rather than aristocratic and full of conceit (with apologies to Shakespeare).
The town identified above the entrance refers to the theater’s birthplace, where Eugene O’Neill first staged “Bound East for Cardiff” in 1916 on a derelict wharf jutting into Provincetown harbor, real-life water lapping beneath rotting floorboards as an actor portraying a dying sailor used “crude” language to bemoan life at sea. MacDougal Street is where the troupe moved a year later.
They re-staged “Bound East” amid a torrent of original plays. O’Neill premiered three the first year, three the second, setting course toward the Nobel Prize for Literature 20 years later.
The original theater was next door, 139 MacDougal, a brownstone built in 1840. The Provincetown Players, as they called themselves, shifted to 133 (a former stable and wine-bottling plant) a year later.
Those who surrounded O’Neill are not as famous, though some are close; Susan Glaspell (a Pulitzer Prize winner), John Reed (whose book “Ten Days that Shook the World” is a World War One classic), Louise Bryant whose life with Reed was dramatized in the movie “Reds,” Diane Keaton as Bryant, Warren Beatty as Reed, Jack Nicholson, amazingly enough, as O’Neill. There also was Harry Kemp, infamous Hobo Poet turned Provincetown’s Poet of the Dunes.
In 1920, O’Neill premiered “The Emperor Jones” with Charles Gilpin as lead, considered the first African-American professional actor to perform with a white company in the United States. The play was a huge success and moved to Broadway.
That sowed dissension; those who characterized this migration as selling out and going commercial were seen by others as full of sour grapes. The group splintered. Come 1929, the Great Stock Market Crash ended many things much more stable than experimental theater in a converted stable.
The building offered apartments upstairs as well as performance space, and attracted a new theatrical generation. But around 2008 New York University announced plans to demolish and rebuild higher, expanding NYU’s law school.
There was major uproar. The outcry resulted only in a promise to save the theater entrance as well as a few interior walls. The brick façade survived, but not much else.
We can stand on MacDougal Street and bemoan the loss of an evocative physical space, muse about a creative, world-altering leap from Cape tip to Big Apple, use a brick wall to conjure an almost-mythical time.
But we have better ways to honor and remember the connection:
The plays.
