Metropolitan Playhouse

The story

A New York theater devoted to 'lost' American plays began in a high school auditorium on West 49th Street. Founded in 1992 by Parsifal's Productions, Inc., Metropolitan Playhouse relocated to the East Village in 1997 and spent the next quarter century rescuing forgotten work — Eulalie Spence one-acts, Pulitzer winners nobody staged anymore, a world premiere of Neith Boyce's Wells adaptation. It presented plays through June 2023. The archive it built of seldom-produced American drama, from Jacob Gordin's Jewish King Lear to Owen Davis's Icebound, amounts to a long argument that the past still has something to say.