New York City is a commercial theatre capital, no question. But the industry that may have the most direct impact on the city’s theatremakers isn’t theatre itself but real estate. The pressures of gentrification, rising costs, and scarcity are felt not only by working- and middle-class residents but by New York’s nonprofit arts organizations, not least the space- and labor-intensive work of theatres and other live arts.
While there are certainly signs of distress across all levels of New York nonprofit theatre—large Off-Broadway companies losing spaces, cancelling or postponing performances and/or laying off employees—it is in what’s generally thought of as “Downtown” theatre that the squeeze is being felt especially acutely. Soho Rep, despite its name a longtime occupant of the Chinatown/Tribeca-adjacent Walkerspace, is currently running its swan song in that beloved venue, Give Me Carmelita Tropicana!, Alina Troyano and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s retrospective farce, through Dec. 22; next year Soho Rep will take up temporary residence at Playwrights Horizons in Midtown Manhattan for most of its shows while it looks for a new permanent home.
Meanwhile, in the East Village, where the Kraine Theatre shut down in late 2023, there are more unsettling signals. In October the historic Connelly Theatre, with two small but hardy venues and a long history of distinguished rentals and co-productions (including the occasional Soho Rep joint), abruptly suspended operations after its longtime general manager, Josh Luxenberg, resigned over interference by the theatre’s landlord, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, which began making rentals contingent on script approval, nixing a play about a transgender rabbi (Becoming Eve, a New York Theatre Workshop production that is still without a home) and making it clear that gender-expansive and reproductive-rights subject matter would not be welcome there.
Other shows have scrambled for new venues, including the Hearth’s Racecar Racecar Racecar and the standup comedy show Jack Tucker. But while the suspension of programming at the Connelly was not driven by real estate concerns but by a troubling instance of institutional censorship, its loss tightens the market for everyone else. Just a few blocks away, the tiny but fierce wild project—a curated rental space with 89 seats run by Ana Mari de Quesada and Tom Escovar—has announced that unless it raises $2.5 million by February 2025 to put a down payment on the building, their landlord will put it on the market and it will almost certainly be snapped up by a residential developer (who would undoubtedly take advantage of the spot’s “air rights” to build condos well up into the East Village sky).
“The owner wants us to own the building,” said de Quesada in a recent interview. “He’s been waiting for us patiently and has been very friendly.” That wait has encompassed years of capital campaigns on either side of the Covid pause, but now the owner “really needs to sell the building.” The asking price for the spot is $5 million; last year, wild project got a $1 million grant from former Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney and a $250,000 grant from the LoCAP fund via New York State Senator Brian Kavanaugh’s office. The theatre hopes to raise an additional million through federal, state, local, community, and foundation resources (as well as via individual donations), so they can make “a larger down payment toward the mortgage,” essentially half the total, “otherwise it’s not fiscally responsible,” said de Quesada.
Said Randi Berry, executive director of Indiespace, which is helping raise money for the effort, wild project is “one of those downtown treasure spaces that has provided a jump-off for so many incredible performers in NYC over the last decade-plus. This home within the indie theatre community deserves a forever presence. We have the chance to secure, permanently, one of the few true indie venues left in downtown Manhattan. We can’t let this vital, beautiful, warm theatre be another lost space on a list of closed venues.”
Losing the wild project, where the current show is The Jo Lynn Butterfly Country Hour of Sunshine Christmas Special, wouldn’t just affect prospective individual productions but also festivals like Clubbed Thumb Summerworks, The Fire This Time Festival, and the Fresh Fruit Festival, which have landed there. Indeed, said Escovar, the core mission of the Wild Project in its decades of operation has been “accessibility for the artists. We have wanted to build programs to give artists an accessible space.”
For Luxenberg, who led the programming at the Connelly for the past 10 years, the attrition isn’t just about vanishing square footage but about a loss of shared experience.
“I tried to build a community around the Connelly,” said Luxenberg, whose own company, Sinking Ship Productions, staged work there (their next play, The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy [redux], goes up at NYTW in January). “It was a little scruffier than other spaces, and, for all its charm, it was never going to feel like a Midtown theatre. But what people would say to me was that the Connelly felt like what theatre would be like in New York but never was. The first time I saw it, it felt like the platonic ideal of a theatre—it set my insides thrumming.”
But a loss of space in New York City isn’t just about quality—it is also, inescapably, about quantity. In the West Village, Luxembourg pointed out, the Cherry Lane Theatre has been acquired by the film company A24 and the Minetta Lane by Audible, while Greenwich House Theater is now a second home for Hell’s Kitchen company Ars Nova. While the last two are programming plenty of work in their respective venues, that makes three fewer stages available for rental below 14th Street.
Risa Shoup, co-executive director at the arts support organization A.R.T./New York, urged philanthropic and government partners to step up and “make it easier for theatres to find stability in an ever-expensive and challenging NYC real estate market. That creates burnout and means we lose talent, we lose stories. We’re all facing erasure of some kind. If we don’t have spaces to tell these stories in an incoming Trump Administration, I’m really worried.”
While owning the building wouldn’t mean the wild project would be out of the woods—they’d still have to raise money to pay down the mortgage and keep up the space, known for its green-friendly policies—there is at least one big potential upside. Those air rights above the building, which make it so tempting for a real estate developer, could also be used to build “a future performing arts center” on the site, as a press release puts it.
Real estate or ideal estate? Stranger things have happened, many of them in New York City.
Rob Weinert-Kendt (he/him) is editor-in-chief of American Theatre.
