the sanford meisner theater
1997: "Cablesurfing"
As I look back at 25 years in the theater, I’ve taken on the side-project of finding the various locations where we produced shows, and seeing what’s there now. Is it still a theater (if it ever was)? Partly I’m just reminiscing, but I’m also documenting how much more challenging it is to produce theater in 2024 than it was even a few years ago. New York has many fewer of the odd, small places where someone decided it was their dream to run a performance space. We have a lot more banks and drugstores and luxury condominiums instead.
As well, a great number of the businesses that supported theater have closed up shop or moved to New Jersey. Big Apple Lights on Canal Street, where I bought sandbags and table bases and safety chain, most of it used. The owner instructed his workmen “the best we’ve got,” which to a wide-eyed innocent like me, not even knowing the right terminology, felt like being welcomed to the club. Rose Brand, in the Chelsea Market before it was packed with tourists finishing their tour of the High Line. ETC Lights, which used to be on - 44th Street? You needed a roll of gaff tape or a bulb, and you could just go and pick it up. Now you drive to Secaucus.
In part, that is the nature of New York - both the nostalgia for the way it was on the day you arrived, and the reality that it had remade itself between the time you crossed the George Washington Bridge and the time you returned the rental truck. Still, it doesn’t seem a good thing that it has become harder in so many ways to put up a show.
In any case, the first public anything we did under the banner of Falconworks - in truth, I’m not even sure it was Falconworks at that point, it might have been just us - was a reading of Pink Flowers’s play Cablesurfing. Cablesurfing is a four-hander about a gay couple; the father of one of them, who moves into their apartment in the latter stages of AIDS; and the nurse who cares for him. How odd, typing that, to realize what a period piece it would be now.
We produced a reading at the Sanford Meisner Theater, at 164 Eleventh Avenue and 22nd Street - at the time a desolate little triangle across from the Chelsea Piers complex. The Sanford Meisner was a wonderful little box, I presume with 99 seats,1 black walls and a plain stage and probably the minimum in the way of backstage amenities. But it was run by theater people, theater people who cared enough to honor a theater artist on the marquee, in the Broadway tradition, and not to give it a catchy name. We filled the house, or nearly, and it felt like we were arriving.
Today, 164 Eleventh Avenue is no more, having been subsumed into a 26-story apartment building called “The Cortland” whose entrance is around the corner on 23rd Street (although for some reason the address is listed as 22nd Street). Aaron Judge owns an apartment there, possibly the penthouse that was listed earlier this year for $40 million. I guess it’s attractive enough. The views, no doubt, are splendid, and Chelsea Piers is still across the street, and it’s a short walk on the High Line, a block away, to the Chelsea Market, where you can find excellent restaurants and trendy stores, but not, so far as I am aware, a roll of gaff tape.
Photographs of the Sanford Meisner Theater by Michael Minn. Used by permission.
https://michaelminn.net/newyork/theatres/midtown/sanford-meisner-theatre/index.html.
Present-day photographs by the author.
99 seats is the upper limit for “off-off-Broadway” theaters under the unions’ definition. https://www.backstage.com/magazine/article/broadway-vs-off-broadway-2972/