Arts & Manners: Old Plays, New Players

Riverside Drive in Manhattan is an unlikely place for a theater, but there is one there, at the corner of 103rd Street. Free is an unusual admissions charge, but that’s all this theater demands. Eight plays are uncommonly many to move through a single house in one season, especially when four are musicals; but that’s the number the surprising Equity Library Theater mounts each year, while invariably maintaining high artistic standards.

The Masters Theater, ELT’s current base of operations, is a small house. Everyone in the audience is close enough to the stage to see the whites of the actors’ eyes. Amplification is unnecessary, so the human voice—not an ersatz, metallic cry—fills the corners of the little hall. Physically, the theater is run down at the heels, shabby, like the residential hotel in which it is housed. Paint peels from the walls, the floor is uncarpeted, the seats worn and tattered. But ELT’s spirit sings with youth, hope, warmth, and good will, making the drab little Masters Theater an exciting place to be.

Riverside Drive in Manhattan is an unlikely place for a theater, but there is one there, at the corner of 103rd Street. Free is an unusual admissions charge, but that’s all this theater demands. Eight plays are uncommonly many to move through a single house in one season, especially when four are musicals; but that’s the number the surprising Equity Library Theater mounts each year, while invariably maintaining high artistic standards.

The Masters Theater, ELT’s current base of operations, is a small house. Everyone in the audience is close enough to the stage to see the whites of the actors’ eyes. Amplification is unnecessary, so the human voice—not an ersatz, metallic cry—fills the corners of the little hall. Physically, the theater is run down at the heels, shabby, like the residential hotel in which it is housed. Paint peels from the walls, the floor is uncarpeted, the seats worn and tattered. But ELT’s spirit sings with youth, hope, warmth, and good will, making the drab little Masters Theater an exciting place to be.