Off-Broadway, in the theatre of the United States, small professional productions that have served since the mid-20th century as New York City’s alternative to the commercially oriented theatres of Broadway.
Off-Broadway plays, usually produced on low budgets in small theatres, have tended to be freer in style and more imaginative than those on Broadway, where high production costs often oblige producers to rely on commercially safe attractions to the neglect of the more serious or experimental drama. The lower costs are permitted in part by more lenient union regulations governing minimum wages and number of personnel. The designations Broadway and Off-Broadway refer not so much to the location of the theatre as to its size and the scale of production; most Broadway theatres are not located on Broadway itself but on the side streets adjacent to it. Some Off-Broadway theatres also are within the Broadway theatre district, although most are remote from midtown Manhattan. Off-Broadway theatres enjoyed a surge of growth in quality and importance after 1952, with the success of the director José Quintero’s productions at the Circle in the Square theatre in Greenwich Village. In two decades of remarkable vitality, Off-Broadway introduced many important theatrical talents, such as the director Joseph Papp, whose later productions included free performances of Shakespeare in Central Park and who formed the Public Theatre, a multitheatre complex dedicated to experimental works. The works of such prizewinning American playwrights as Edward Albee, Charles Gordone, Paul Zindel, Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson, and John Guare were first produced off Broadway, along with the unconventional works of European avant-garde dramatists such as Eugène Ionesco, Ugo Betti, Jean Genet, Samuel Beckett, and Harold Pinter and revivals of Bertolt Brecht and Eugene O’Neill. The small theatres also trained many noted performers and experts in lighting, costume, and set design.
Like Broadway, Off-Broadway theatres began to suffer from soaring costs; this stimulated the emergence in the early 1960s of still less expensive and more daring productions, quickly labeled Off-Off-Broadway. The most successful of these have included such groups as The Negro Ensemble Company, La Mama Experimental Theatre Company, the Open Theatre, Manhattan Theatre Club, Ensemble Studio Theatre, and Roundabout.