ANTA Washington Square Theatre

The story

It looked like a mustard-yellow warehouse — a characterless steel box about 20 feet high that Marvin Carlson said suggested a storage facility from the outside. Inside, though, it had no curtain and a thrust stage tilted toward an audience sitting on three sides. Robert Whitehead built it in a hurry: he had actors, he had Arthur Miller and S. N. Behrman commissioned, and he needed a room. New York University leased him the land on West Fourth Street; ANTA paid an estimated $525,000. From early 1964 to 1965 it was the first home of the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center, before the Vivian Beaumont was finished.