"In 1950 a group of players migrated down out of the cold of Woodstock, New York, to an abandoned Greenwich Village nightclub. All they wanted to do was start up a theatre in New York City. What they did was ignite a cultural explosion." "The old Broadway was dying. Its core audience was moving out to the new suburbs. Circle in the Square put an ad in the paper for actors and started presenting classic American and European plays, as well as ambitious original productions. It was pure suicide. At first, the people on stage outnumbered those in the seats, and the police tried to close them down." "And then the first miracle occurred. Geraldine Page showed up; Jose Quintero directed her in a nearly forgotten Tennessee Williams play, Summer and Smoke; and Brooks Atkinson gave it a super rave in the New York Times. The box office was mobbed. Off-Broadway was born, and a new kind of theatre had come to America - passionate, literate, and risky." "Not that it got any easier. Through the decades, Theodore Mann has kept Circle in the Square alive by leaping from the precipice of one hit to another, taking on every task from stoking a dilapidated furnace to directing Tony Award-winning productions. In the process Mann has helped restore the reputation of one of our greatest playwrights, Eugene O'Neill, first with a landmark revival of The Iceman Cometh and then with the American premiere of Long Day's Journey Into Night. Mann's own long journey has been inextricably linked with O'Neill, and he presents here some extremely significant, previously unreported aspects of the O'Neill saga." "Here is Theodore Mann's own account of the theatrical and cultural revolution that is Circle in the Square. If you ever wondered how off-Broadway came to be (and how it ever managed to survive), this is the tale to read."--BOOK JACKET.