On the evening of May 19, 1927, The Grand Street Follies opened at the Neighborhood Playhouse at 466 Grand Street on the lower east side of Manhattan.  This was the "Fifth Edition" of the follies and one of the major end-of-season dates for the artists, producers, critics, and fans of theater in New York.  Joseph Wood Krutch, by mid-century one of the city's most eminent men of letters but then a young critic for the Nation, contributed a program note that declared the Neighborhood Playhouse unquestionably superior to its leading contemporaries in the avant-garde theater of the day, the Provincetown Players and the Washington Square Players.  Brooks Atkinson, senior critic for the New York Times, filed not one review but three stories about events on Grand Street.  Both of the critics, like most of their colleagues, noted that while experimental and bohemian companies like Provincetown and Washington Square had become increasingly "uptown" in institutional organization, location, and audience, the Neighborhood Playhouse had willfully disregarded  all marketplace sense and remained even further downtown than Greenwich Village in a sprawling slum area.  Krutch, evidently not a neighbor, called the location "a peculiar quarter."

It was not high art that brought both intelligentsia and mainstream critics so far downtown in May, 1927; it was a cutting send-up of the pieties of both groups.  There had been predecessors to the first Grand Street Follies: the Greenwich Village Follies began in 1919 and the Neighborhood Playhouse editions in 1922.  And there had been successors, such as the Theater Guild's fund-raiser in 1925 to which Rogers and Hart contributed that memorable song, "The Garrick Gaieties."  But the Grand Street Follies alone narrowed its focus from all the possibilities for revue sketches to parody of the vanities, excesses, and absurdities of theater alone.  In 1927 Krutch and Atkinson, arbiters of taste in drama, watched Albert Carroll, a long-time member of the Neighborhood Playhouse company who made a specialty of such things, impersonate the renowned doyenne of American stage Mrs. Fisk, who had recently appeared in a highly-praised modern-dress production of Ibsen's Ghosts  in a sketch called "A Fiord Joke" that included an onstage argument between the actress and the critic Alexander Woolcott.  In the same program, in "School for Rivals," Carroll returned as Ethel Barrymore playing a maid in a collision of the Sheridan restoration comedies then enjoying a new vogue.  These Grand Street Follies also included a satire of the theater world's perennial debates over propriety and censorship by having Aline Bernstein, the great theater designer, and the first woman to gain entry into the United Scenic Artists Union, along with the well-known actors Dorothy Sands and Marc Loebell, play artists doing hard time in prison for crimes against propriety: "Stars with Stripes."

One great uptown success of the season had been Sidney Howard's The Silver Cord, a Freudian-literate parlor drama of a son's oppressive relation with his mother; The Grand Street Follies responded with "A Bedtime Story," in which Carroll, now "Mother's Boy," sings lyrics written by Agnes Morgan, director of most Neighborhood Playhouse productions and instigator, with her companion Helen Arthur, of the follies:

 Mammy won't you love your baby?
 Mammy won't you cuddle me some more?
 Roll your eyes across me
 Then pick me up and toss me
 And let me sleep beside you on the floor.

To which Dorothy Sands, impersonating the mother as played by her uptown counterpart Laura Hope Crewes, returns:

 Baby won't you kiss your mammy?
 In your little nighty
 Hold your mammy tighty
 Just like the flower draws the honey bee.
 Ah but now we know
 Things should not be so
 To such love they now insist a meaning clings.
 And my passion mad
 Means I'm longing for your dad, so
 Untie those silver strings.

The long program of 19 numbers included a "posthumous" work of Gilbert and Sullivan ridiculing Calvin Coolidge's isolationism ("Hurray For Us!"), a transformation of Dorothy Parker and Elmer Rice's Close Harmony about the homogeneity of middle-class life, into an extraordinarily diverse minstrel show called "Close Harmony in Detroit," and, as finale, Albert Carroll returning in his annual burlesque of John Barrymore playing Hamlet in the celebrated 1922 production designed by Robert Edmond Jones.

The energy and frivolity of the 1927 follies is in retrospect all the more striking because five weeks earlier the Neighborhood Playhouse, producing plays on Grand Street since 1915, announced that it would close.  The story was newsworthy enough to be placed on the front page of the New York Times.  "In announcing the decision to close the present theatre," it reported, "the Misses Irene and Alice Lewisohn, who have sponsored the enterprise from the beginning, said that it was a step dictated not by the failure of the theatre, but by its success and the necessity for expansion."   The Lewisohns, unmarried at the time and often paired as "Misses," were daughters of  one of New York's most distinguished philanthropic families.  Since 1903 they had been involved in many of the educational and artistic activities of the Henry Street Settlement, the Neighborhood Playhouse's inspiration, sponsoring institution, and source of its non-profit status.  In 1915, Alice and Irene had built and opened the Neighborhood Playhouse building at 466 Grand Street, nearby the Henry Street Settlement.  For thirteen years they remained virtually the sole benefactors of a theater enterprise that had evolved from an instrument of social betterment into, at the time of closing, one of only two (the other was the Theater Guild) theatrical producing institutions in New York City that functioned independent of the Schubert organization.  The value of their support was cited by the Times as $540,000 as an annual endowment of $45,000.  That total, provided by the Lewisohns, was generally accepted; the annual commitment, however, had escalated from an original pledge of $10,000 per year and the annual endowment by closing was considerably more than $45,000.

No one at the 1927 follies seemed to accept the Lewisohn's public claim that the closing was only a pause before expansion.  Krutch's piece in the follies program mourned that "it will leave an absolute blank in its place."  Atkinson's notice, "Last of the Neighborhood Frolics," announced that "this was the last Neighborhood production . . . the delights offered on the exotic east side have now come to an end."   Atkinson's follow-up feature a week later on the front page of the Sunday entertainment section eulogized the company and memorialized its end: "when the curtain descends the most inspiring acting organization in this city will conclude a noble little career among the pushcarts and gents' furnishing shops of the east side ."  The full impact of the closing had special urgency in less mandarin spheres of the theatrical world.  Leon Whipple, writing that summer in the Survey Graphic, a journal of the social settlement movement, asked his readers: "Does America want a theatre with a soul?  Can we provide the environment for an institution that combines intellect, sincerity, and esthetic culture with an open-minded quest for the new, the charming, and the historic?   The challenge is not to them [the Lewisohns], but to us.  To give up what the Neighborhood Playhouse stands for will mean a defeat to our whole culture."

The Neighborhood Playhouse was launched in the same month -- February 1915 -- as the Provincetown Players and the Washington Square Players.  When it closed, the Neighborhood Playhouse had outlasted in original form the first, by then in a more commercial reincarnation as the Provincetown Playhouse, and the second, which, reformed uptown as The Theatre Guild, was at that moment in 1927 expanding operations for an additional Chicago season.  The closing was to the public unexpected because the Neighborhood Playhouse, on the basis of two remarkable productions, was coming off its most successful seasons.  The 1925-26 season had opened with an acclaimed original staging of a well-known Yiddish folk tale of transmigration of souls called The Dybbuk.  After angry and divisive board meetings in January, 1926, the final decision was against moving the production uptown to mainstream theater and larger grosses.  Other credibly bohemian and artistic productions were doing just that: the Eugene O'Neill and Kenneth Macgowan transferred their production of The Great God Brown from the Greenwich Village Theater to larger audiences uptown a week after The Dybbuk move was vetoed.  In the season before, 1924-25, the Neighborhood Playhouse season had opened with The Little Clay Cart, a dance-drama adaptation of a Hindu tale that, again, despite critical and popular acclaim, and against theater business trends of the time, was not transferred uptown.  In earlier years, the company had with considerable success moved uptown productions of the works of Shaw, Lord Dunsany, and Harley Granville Barker.  Bitter organizational disagreements on the Neighborhood Playhouse board, and the many artistic and commercial motives to move or not to move, are part of the record story of what Brooks Atkinson called "the most inspiring acting organization" in New York in one of the greatest decades of theater.

Atkinson, like Krutch and all others, repeatedly drew attention to the setting of the theater, to the "neighborhood," that remote and to most genuinely frightening location to which the company only provided independent transportation in the last month of its existence.  The theater built by the Misses Lewisohn still stands on Grand Street, but the rest of the block has been radically transformed by modern "urban renewal" and housing development.  The first urban design for the area, beginning in the 1830's, was the first tenement housing in New York City.  That infrastructure soon decayed into a vast, dense, and fractious Irish slum (with Irish theater, as popularized later by local product Ned Harrigan), and then, from the 1880's, into a vast, dense, fractious Jewish slum (with Yiddish theater, as popularized later by local products the Marx brothers).   The program for the opening of the theater at 466 Grand Street in 1915 announced its intention "to be a community playhouse, where the traditions of the neighborhood can find artistic expression, where anyone with special gifts can contribute his talent, and where interesting productions of serious plays and comedies as well as the lighter forms of entertainment may be found."  The program gave directions by subway, elevated, and streetcar; the theater's old-numeration telephone number, resonant of pushcart commerce, was 1365 Orchard.

This theater impulse took its departure from one of the New York's most successful attempts to intervene into an urban blight compounded by stupendous numbers of new immigrants.  In 1893, Lillian Wald, who had forsaken finishing school for nursing school, moved into the neighborhood to address slum conditions from the standpoint of disease prevention.  She secured support from the philanthropist Jacob Schiff, who, like the Lewisohns, was an assimilated and established German Jew and so as much an outsider on the lower east side as Wald herself among the new waves of Eastern European immigrants then called, not "Jews," but "Russians."  Wald's nursing organization became one of the most prominent models in the contemporary settlement movement.  In 1913, on the 20th anniversary of the founding of the Henry Street Settlement, the Lewisohns staged a weekend-long festival.  The city agreed to repave the street and install the new electric street lighting, and the Board of Education loaned school space to costume a cast of 500, mostly children, who acted out in song and dance the evolution of the neighborhood from the Dutch period of New York for an outdoor audience of 10,000, mostly new immigrants.  By coincidence, the festival occurred on the same weekend in 1913 as the far more radical Paterson Strike Pageant at Madison Square in support of striking workers in New Jersey.  Newspaper editorials quickly drew the contrast between the exemplary Henry Street festival and the dangerous Madison Square riot.

After 1913, the Lewisohn sisters staged as many as five festivals annually outdoors, then produced plays in rentable space at Clinton Hall on Nassau Street, and then, in 1915, under tax-exempt status by virtue of its affiliation with the Henry Street Settlement, opened the rather opulent theater building based on European designs that they named the Neighborhood Playhouse.  In Wald's her first autobiography, The House on Henry Street, which was published in the opening year of the theater, she expressed hope "that the playhouse, identified with the neighborhood, may recapture and hold something of the poetry and idealism that belong to its  people and open the door of opportunity."  In her second autobiography, Windows on Henry Street, published in 1934, she recalled only that "when it was realized that the pressure of the expedient would gradually compel a departure from the more informal point of view, the closing of the Neighborhood Playhouse was inevitable."  Wald was capable of very powerful prose, alternately vehement and hilarious in speech and written word.  This cryptic dismissal -- even so long after the fact -- suggests some of the tensions inherent in the link of the leading institution of the settlement movement with the leading institution of the little theater movement.  The same change in tone can also be traced in the arc over time of a voluminous correspondence between "Miss Lillian" and the sisters, addressed together as "Alirene," that changed from personalized enthusiasm to frosty business notes.  Wald was no enemy to serious theater: she particularly admired the Neighborhood Playhouse production of John Galsworthy's The Mob, an antiwar statement, in 1920, against a wave of American isolationism and red-baiting that could find enemies at will on the lower east side.  Wald, however, was also skeptical wary of the financial extravagance and artistic egoism necessary to take a successful production from the neighborhood audience to an uptown, larger, and more profitable one.

To this place, the lower east side, and to this institution, the Henry Street Settlement, the Lewisohn's brought Charles Frohman, the producer, the real Ethel Barrymore, the leading British actresses Ellen Terry and Gertrude Kingston, the monologist Ruth Draper, Sarah Cowell Le Moyne, senior stateswoman of the American stage and mentor to Alice, and a new company led by Whitford Kane known as the Irish Players.  All this was produced at the Neighborhood Playhouse in the first five months of its existence in early 1915.  In the same period, the "producing staff" of the Lewisohns, Agnes Morgan, and Helen Arthur staged three original productions: a dance drama, Jephtha's Daughter, directed by the Lewisohns, a realist drama called The Waldies co-directed by Morgan and Alice, and a bill of one-act plays including the Irish playwright Lord Dunsany's The Glittering Gate, Shaw's Captain Brassbound's Conversion, and Wilfred Wilson Gibson's Womenkind.  The season ended with a ten-day outdoor festival, "The Greek Games."  The drafts and typescripts and filed memoranda from this period included in the enormous "Neighborhood Playhouse Gift" archive left to the Billy Rose Theater Collection of the New York Public Library include pages and pages of notes and carbon copies of memos from Alice to others about a frenzy of activity including productions by the Neighborhood Players, productions by the Festival Dancers, visits by guest artists, motion picture offerings on weeknights, script readings, musical offerings, children entertainments on weekends, exhibitions  in the theater foyer, meetings of the producing staff, meetings of the advisory board, meetings of Henry Street Settlement clubs, business meetings. publications and programs meetings, and so on and so forth.

The Neighborhood Playhouse at 466 Grand Street would operate as originally constituted by the Lewisohns for 13 seasons, including one roughly midpoint "sabbatical season."  The most prominent productions in a great volume of activity in the first years included staging of Stravinski's Petrouska days before its official New York opening at the Metropolitan Opera, American premieres of works by Dunsany, Shaw and W. B. Yeats, productions with designs by Robert Edmond Jones, and dance performances by Michio Ito.  All this was accomplished by a company of amateurs and volunteers.  Because of its successes, the company gradually became professionalized in actors, office staff, and backstage crew.  In this middle phase of its evolution the Neighborhood Playhouse produced works by Harley Granville Barker, staged the English-language premiere of James Joyce's play Exiles, the first production of Eugene O'Neill's The First Man, and an original "lyric drama" based on the works of Walt Whitman called Salut au Monde.  For a 10th anniversary celebration on February 11, 1925, the celebrated George Pierce Baker, leader of the "47 Workshop" that produced many American theater professionals, including O'Neill and Agnes Morgan, came to Grand Street to express thanks to the Neighborhood Playhouse.  From its own stage, he thanked the company on behalf of  "a whole group of experimenting little theatres that has always looked to the Neighborhood Playhouse for inspiration and guidance -- to the direction, the acting, the costumes, the settings, and to the spirit of its workers."  Even at this moment of celebration, however, economic concerns were challenging artistic ones.  Wald was a prolific writer of thank-you notes and a great keeper of records, most of which now constitute the Lillian Wald papers at Columbia University.  Having read Baker's speech, she  wrote to him two days after the anniversary to thank him for his words and to apologize for being absent at another event.  She added, "the Misses Lewisohn have been most generous, but the cost of the Playhouse is greater than they can carry, and we may have to give it up at no distant date if we do not find understanding help."

At this point, in 1925, the Neighborhood Playhouse had already invented theater subscriptions and developed a subscription list of 10,000.  It had gradually increased ticket prices, and it had professionalized publicity efforts.  At New Year in this eleventh season it also decided against moving its immensely popular production of Little Clay Cart uptown.  Both George Pierce Baker and Lillian Wald, from very different perspectives on theater, recognized the Neighborhood Playhouse as an "experiment," and the paradox of the experiment is that its greatest degree of success coincided with its sudden demise.  A little later, in the summer of 1925, the novelist Thomas Wolfe, then aged twenty-five and another recent graduate of Baker's "47 Workshop," was composing fiction on the Neighborhood Playhouse during a torrid affair with Aline Bernstein, then forty-four years old.  What he composed later appeared in The Web and the Rock:

The theatre, one of those little theatres that had their inception as a kind of work of charity, as a sort of adjunct to "settlement work" among "the poor classes," was supported largely by the endowments of wealthy females, and had grown quite celebrated in recent years.  In the beginning, no doubt, its purposes had been largely humanitarian.  That is to say, certain yearning sensitivenesses had banded together in a kind of cultural federation whose motto might very well have been: "They've got to eat cake."  At the inception, there was probably a good deal of nonsense about "bringing beauty into their lives," ennobling the swarming masses of the East Side through the ballet, "the arts of the dance," "the theatre of ideas," and all the rest of the pure old neurotic aestheticism that tainted the theatre of the period.

Nor were the principal players of the Neighborhood Playhouse the passive kind of administrators of the "endowments of wealthy females" imagined by Wolfe's narrator.  The producing staff from the founding in 1915 was Alice and Irene Lewisohn, Agnes Morgan, and Helen Arthur.  By closing in 1927 Aline Bernstein and Alice Beer had joined them on the masthead listing.  Lillian Wald, Rita Morgenthau, and others watched from an administrative remove as an "Advisory Committee." But the same four -- in her letters to Wolfe, Bernstein called them "the N. P. H. Women" -- continued to debate all decisions at great length, to vote on them at business meetings for which Beer kept copious minutes, and then, however reluctantly, to speak with one voice about the course of the Neighborhood Playhouse.  One valuable witness to this process was Doris Fox Benardete, who, as Doris Fox, worked in the theater office, where she me Mr. Benardete.  Twenty years after the closing, she wrote a narrative of her experience as a dissertation at New York University.  The entire dynamic of the organization, in her account, was a matter of "pretty intense personalities":

Helen Arthur and Agnes Morgan lived together as friends, but they had chosen each other as adults; their affection was a matter of choice.  The Lewisohns, on the other hand, lived together as sisters, not from choice as adults but largely from habit and the force of circumstances.  Some say they lived together too long.

These intense personalities working in complex organizational relationships found a outlet in the self-parodic and anarchic Grand Street Follies satirizing both themselves and their work.  The enterprise had begun even before the Neighborhood Playhouse opened when, after an early, Clinton Hall season in which Alice played a maid in Galsworthy's The Silver Box, Morgan, for a staff party, staged a burlesque of the heiress bravely trying to play a maid.  The Grand Street Follies became public at the end of the 1921-22 season when, lacking the promised final June production, the directors invited the subscribers to their annual party.  Since they had succeeded so well that season with Harley Granville Barker's The Madras House, which had moved uptown, they parodied their success in "The Mattress House," in which the business empire of the play became a brothel, Agnes Morgan every man's "Oriental Dream," and Helen Arthur "Turkish Delight."  Irene Lewisohn's greatest labor of the previous season had been a ballet, Royal Fandango, in which she danced the lead, and this returned in the follies as "The Royal Damn Fango," she returned as the male lead, and Albert Carroll played Irene, dancing. The opening skit of the first follies presented "the first dramatic critic," Adam, attributing great mischief to theaters like the Neighborhood Playhouse, and the last skit, in the lobby of the building, presented David Belasco, Laurette Taylor, Alla Nazimova, and others damning the whole little theater movement and the Neighborhood Playhouse in particular.  Though the book credit was given to "Everybody," Alice's name does not appear on the program.  One week later she chaired a "vital meeting" of the staff, and two days after that the Neighborhood Playhouse, at the moment of greatest success yet, announced that it would remain closed in 1922-23 as a "sabbatical season."

It did reopen in 1923, but not after the announcement of closing in 1927.  That 1927 follies, in which neither Alice nor Irene appeared, later moved uptown under the auspices of a new entity, the Actor-Mangers Company including Arthur, Morgan, and Bernstein.  It continued for several years, offered opportunities to young actors such as James Cagney, and toured widely, but it never achieved the kind of New York recognition given to the Grand Street versions by critics like Joseph Wood Krutch and Brooks Atkinson.  The Lewisohns also produced uptown and also failed to achieve the kind of influential successes already achieved downtown.  Irene and Aline Berstein collaborated on the creation of an archive of productions  that became the Museum of Costume Art and later the costume collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Thanks to the energies of Rita Morgenthau after 1927, the name of the original company survives today in the Neighborhood Playhouse School of Theater located on the upper east side of New York.  In 1928 the building built on Grand Street was sold by the Lewisohns to the Henry Street Settlement, which operates it today as part of the Abrons Arts Center with local performances for the new lower east side neighborhood and school programs reaching into New York City public schools system.

All these projects are very different from that quite well-defined, quite successful, and quite instructive life of the Neighborhood Playhouse on Grand Street from 1915 to 1927.  The verses from the Rogers and Hart's "Garrick Gaieties" bring out in comic fashion the extraordinary ambition of this experiment to bring uptown downtown, high culture to broad audiences, Eurocentrism to globalism, and by art to bring about social change:

 Neighborhood Playhouse may shine below the Macy Gimbel line,
 It was built to make a ride for people on Fifth Avenue.
 To Yeats and Synge and Shaw and such we add an oriental touch,
 We bring out the aesthetic soul you didn't know you have in you!

 We like to serve a mild dish of folklore quaintly childish,
 Or something Oscar Wildish, in pantomime or dance.
 Grand Street Folk we never see'em, they think the place is a museum.
 And we know just what we do, because we always take a chance.

Gaieties being gaieties, Hart was free to parody the effort.  But the Neighborhood Playhouse had succeeded with art, with audiences, and with activism.  And it closed abruptly.  In its front-page coverage of the announcement, the Times had followed the Lewisohns logic that it was closing because of success.  However, in the Neighborhood Playhouse archives left by the Lewisohns to the New York Public Library, there is an undated, unsigned typescript with edits in the hand of Irene Lewisohn that reads rather differently

 In 1927 when we closed the doors of the building in Grand Street we announced that having completed a certain phase in the development of our idea we felt it necessary to pause and contemplate the next step.  To many that gesture indicated a finality -- a sudden cessation of an activity just growing into an institution -- a cutting off in its coming of age of a child ready to achieve its heritage.  Constantly we are met with the question: "Why did the Neighborhood Playhouse stop?"