Caffe Cino, Part 1

[Almost seven years ago, I posted a two-part article on Rick On Theater called “Greenwich Village Theater in the 1960s” (12 and 15 December 2011).  It was principally about the genesis of Off-Off-Broadway, the non-commercial, non-union theater that began as an alternative to the commercially-oriented, union-regulated productions of Broadway and Off-Broadway.  I reported in “Greenwich Village Theater” that the sipapu, the place of emergence, of Off-Off-Broadway was Greenwich Village and what, after 1964, was dubbed the East Village, and specifically, 31 Cornelia Street—the home after 1958 of the Caffe Cino.  Joe Cino, the coffeehouse’s proprietor, opened his café theater 60 years ago this December.  Until recently, there’d never been an extensive history of the Cino—there are few records or documents on the café’s history; it’s all in the memories of those who were there, and that's a fading population—so I thought this would be an opportune time to post a little compilation on the historic  venue.  I’m posting it in two parts, so come back to ROT on 14 September for the continuation of “Caffe Cino.”]

Off-Off-Broadway, the theater arena in which new artists like actors, directors, and playwrights, often get their starts in the business of show, is a New York City phenomenon.  (Some cities have a vague equivalent, especially after the Off-Off-Broadway theater here made itself known in the 1960s and ’70s.)  There’s no real money on the Off-Off-Broadway stage, and the working conditions are as minimal as you can imagine, but there’s a lot of experience, some exposure (agents, managers, and producers have been known to check out what are often called “showcases”—because that’s often what they are—to see if there’s some new talent or new property to interest them.  It could happen . . . .).

Since the 1980s or so, Off-Off-Broadway has spread out across the city, not only to all quarters of Manhattan, but all across the city.  But when the movement got started in the late 1950s and early-to-mid-1960s, it was centered in Greenwich Village and what was becoming known as the East Village.  The exact spot where Off-Off-Broadway began was a coffeehouse on a tree lined-block of a typical West Village lane, Cornelia Street between Bleecker and West 4th Streets—number 31, the home of Caffe Cino.

The building that housed Caffe Cino, a four-story red brick walk-up with apartments above the ground floor was built in 1877 as a tenement.  (There have been numerous renovations and up-grades since then to conform to changing requirements and codes for New York City buildings.  Though the interior of 31 Cornelia Street, as well as the building’s utilities and safety features, have been modernized, its exterior is basically unchanged—somewhat cleaner, perhaps—from its appearance in the days of Caffe Cino.)  The entrance to the ground-floor commercial space, where the coffeehouse was located, is flanked by two cast-iron pilasters.  Like the street on which it stands, it’s pretty typical of the neighborhood.  Nothing about it stands out—except that what went on there changed the face of New York theater forever and had a profound impact on American theater as a whole.  

Joe Cino started the Caffe Cino Art Gallery, as it was first called, in December 1958 and issued a call for artist friends to hang their art on the walls of the new coffeehouse.  In 1965, he told the Village Voice (in his one and only interview), “My idea was always to start with a beautiful, intimate, warm, non-commercial, friendly atmosphere where people could come and not feel pressured or harassed.”  The art displays soon led to poetry readings (how Greenwich Village coffeehouse!), and that led directly to reading plays.  From there it was just a short step to putting the plays on.  And remember, Greenwich Village was the very center of all things avant-garde: the bohemians congregated there in the ’teens, ’20s, and ’30s; the Beats, who really started the “coffeehouse scene,” in the ’50s; and the hippies and Yippies in the ’60s.  

(By the way, the Caffe Cino is often misnamed in the press and other sources.  First of all, Joe Cino, a proud Sicilian-American, chose the Italian designation for his establishment to be different from all the other Village coffeehouses—though some reports say it was an accident from a misprint in an ad that just stuck—so it’s not “Café Cino”—and he also never used the accent mark in the coffeehouse’s name [caffè].  Unfortunately, if you want to look the place up, especially on line, you have to misspell the name to be sure to catch all the potential hits since even the New York Times called the place “Cafe Cino.”  Go know, right?)

Joseph Cino (1931-67) was born in Buffalo into a traditional Italian-American family.  He was attracted to dance and opera from a young age, which didn’t sit well with his three brothers and his schoolmates because they felt that an Italian boy shouldn’t be interested in dancing.  It was also becoming increasingly obvious that young Joe was gay, something else that wasn’t in line with his community.  As a result, though Joe and his mother were close, the frictions with his family increased and in 1948, when he was 16, Joe ran away to New York City to become a dancer.  

He began a string of meaningless jobs such as waiter, clerk, receptionist, and soda-jerk—the kind of thing many performing artists do when they’re starting out—and studied dance at the Henry Street Settlement on the Lower East Side; he also studied acting, speech, and make-up.  Despite a scholarship to Jacob’s Pillow, the dance center and school in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts, and a few gigs with dance troupes, the dance career didn’t happen, probably because Cino didn’t look much like a dancer: just five-foot-nine, he was “sometimes described as ‘roundish.’”  In his 2003 history of the Off-Off-Broadway theater, David Crespy drew this picture of Joe Cino:

He had a head of thick, curly hair and dark brown eyes.  His standard uniform was a sweatshirt worn inside out, jeans, and yellow boots.  His cherubic face, rimmed by a scruffy, half-grown beard, was filled with a delightful warmth—his smile dazzled and according to those who knew him, he exuded love, nurturing, and an irrepressible charm.  He was pudgy and at the same time graceful . . . .  

After 10 years of trying and closing in on 27, he was ready to move on to something else.

One of those bread-and-butter jobs Cino had was as a waiter at the Playhouse Café at 131 MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village, a four-minute walk east from 31 Cornelia.  Cino learned about working in a coffeehouse and, especially, how to run an espresso machine at the Playhouse Café, so named because it was just a couple of doors down from the historic Provincetown Playhouse (115 MacDougal).  It was while working at the Playhouse, where occasional plays were read, that Cino saved the money from his pay, stashed in a drawer in his apartment, that he would eventually use to open his own coffeehouse, something he considered during his stint at the Playhouse.  When the café closed, Cino made his move.

Cino’d been thinking about opening a café on and off since as early as 1954, he said.  Among his friends were many artists, and he thought he’d hang their paintings in his fantasy joint.  One of his friends (and current lover) was painter Ed Franzen, who worked at New York University in the Village.  Franzen was looking for a studio where he could work and show his paintings and he knew that Cino wanted a place, too.  One day in November 1958, Franzen called his friend and told him he’d stumbled on a storefront in the West Village and when Cino met the painter at 31 Cornelia Street, the incipient OOB impresario found Franzen in conversation with the landlady, who was leaning out an upstairs window.  The painter introduced his future partner: “This is Mrs. Lemma.”  “Oh, you’re Italian,” said Cino.  “Yes,” said Josie Lemma, “what are you?”  Cino answered, “Sicilian.”  And a connection was made.  The rest, as the cliché goes, is (theater) history.

Mrs. Lemma threw the keys to the storefront down to them and the painter and the ex-dancer went in to look the place over.  Here’s how Cino recounts the rest of the historic moment:

The first thing you saw when you looked down the room was the toilet at the back.  I thought, “There’s a toilet, and there’s a sink, and there’s a fireplace.  This will be a counter, a coffee machine here, a little private area.”  I turned around and looked and said, “This is the room, I have no idea what to do with it.”

The room was small, narrow, open, and plain.  It had wood floors, exposed-brick walls, and a pressed-metal ceiling.  The metal ceiling would be covered by a plaster drop ceiling when Cino installed a lighting system and Cino soon decorated his “room” with

twinkling fairy lights, strung liberally across the ceiling, and then the sprinkling of glitter dust on the floor for show nights.  Festoons of hanging decorations followed—cutouts, mobiles, baubles, glitter angels, miniature Chinese lanterns, and ever more fairy lights.

In his New York Times review of Tom Eyen’s The White Whore and the Bit Player in 1967, Dan Sullivan observed that Cino had hung “enough twinkling lights to decorate a forest of psychedelic Christmas trees.”  

When “the Cino,” as it became known, started presenting plays, the generally nondescript character of the room would change depending on the plays being produced as the participants brought in new scenery each week.  The most emblematic element of the space, however, were the walls.  They were soon bedecked with “glossy photos of stars and unknowns, opera posters, Christmas decorations, and crunched foil, often interspersed with paintings by Kenneth Burgess, Cino’s resident artist,” and other ephemera the patrons brought in.  These became the most memorable element in the café and Joe Cino’s special domain.  Memorabilia Cino felt was special, such as the résumé a young Bette Midler (who never got to work at the Cino) gave him, was stapled to the wall behind the coffee bar.  If the wall décor had to be rearranged for a play or for cleaning and repainting, afterwards its original appearance would have to be reconstructed.  Only Cino himself could add or subtract from the display.  

Franzen and Cino opened Caffe Cino on a Friday night in early December with about 30 customers, all friends.  The music Cino chose for his café, in contrast with the prevailing taste of the Greenwich Village coffeehouses for folk music—for which Cino had little regard—was opera and classical.  Veteran Cino dramatist Robert Patrick (who’d eventually earn the rep as the most prolific Off-Off-Broadway playwright) recalled, “There was a jukebox, which was full of opera records.”  As for the rest of the activities in the café, Joe Cino reminisced:

I was thinking of a cafe with poetry readings, with lectures, maybe with dance concerts.  The one thing I never thought of was fully staged productions of plays.  I thought of doing readings, but I never thought any of the technical things would be important.

The café started presenting poetry readings immediately, just as Cino had planned.  Then after about five months of operation, Caffe Cino began offering play readings around “a long pine table.”  The first reading was “a condensed version of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest” on 7 February 1959 and the coffeehouse was packed.  It was supposed to be a one-off event: “I didn’t even think of doing it again,” affirmed Cino.  He didn’t want “to disturb the rhythm of the room.”  But Caffe Cino immediately scheduled a Monday night reading, then soon, Tuesday, and so on, one performance a night.  

They read works by Jean Genet, Tennessee Williams, William Inge, Oscar Wilde, Jean-Paul Sartre, Thornton Wilder, J. D. Salinger, Noel Coward, André Gide, Anton Chekhov, Jean Cocteau, George Bernard Shaw, Harold Pinter, and other established American and European writers.  Cino resisted giving readings on the weekends and he recalled that it was almost two years before the coffeehouse was having readings all week long.  He said the performers “went to staging right away.”  Not precisely: Robert Dahdah, the Cino’s most frequent director, staged Sartre’s No Exit in February 1960, the first play to be fully mounted there.

There was no actual stage at the Cino—an 8-by-8-foot piece of wood was put down to mark the acting area and it was portable so it could be set down anywhere in the café.  Props, set, lighting, and costumes were minimal, no more than was absolutely necessary to perform the play (and, of course, pretty much everything was scrounged, borrowed, or, occasionally, swiped.  Lighting, even with the café’s limited technical resources, was the chief artistic means of creating an atmosphere for the plays.  Crespy described it as “dazzling and inventive” and recounts, “Many remember the lighting as one of the most magical aspects of the Cino.”  Cino introduced each performance, always—and famously—announcing as he left the performance area: “It’s magic time!”  

The “room,” as Cino apparently called his coffeehouse, was reconfigured to suit each play, with the performance space being set up in a different spot on the floor and the tables rearranged accordingly.  From short scenes to one-act plays to full-lengths, the performances expanded in response to both the demand of the audiences and the avidity of the artists.  (One thing about actors and playwrights: they love to work—an actor friend of mine used to like to quip: “Actors are the only people who’ll work for nothing . . . if you let them!”)   Pretty soon, says Crespy, the Cino “began to look more like a stage with a café on it.”

The café accommodated about 40 customers in its 18-by-30-foot space—the legal maximum capacity was 90, according to Robert Patrick, who often manned the door,  but when there was a performance, many more than that squeezed in anywhere they could, even sitting atop the cigarette machine.  The coffeehouse’s patrons, with their food and drinks at the 20 tiny café tables inches from the stage, were constantly in danger of spilling their coffee on the actors if one or the other wasn’t careful, but the closeness of the spectators and the performers turned the performance into an event they all shared.  There was no separation, no distance.  As Joe Cino himself put it, “When I now go to see something on a proscenium stage it’s like something else—with no comparisons to what is done here.  But this is a theatre, a mirror of all the madness of everything else that is happening.”

Soon, one performance a night grew into two by January 1961, with an 11 o’clock show.  There wasn’t always an audience, but the casts performed anyway.  Cino would insist that the actors “do it for the room.”  That first two-fer was a 32-minute adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, which Cino called “one of the most beautiful things we had at the Cino.”  The lighting, another first at the Cino, as designed by resident lighting wizard, Johnny Dodd, “was very tight, just for the actors in the performing areas.  The rest of the room was dark.”  

The development of the Cino as a theatrical venue was never really planned out but grew rather like Topsy.  The performers, writers, directors, and production artists who put on the plays were at first friends of Cino’s, but theater folk are always on the look-out for places to ply their art, so the pool of artists widened quickly.  Cino himself never performed in the plays, but after the last show, Jerome Robbins, already a star in the dance world, occasionally came by so he and Cino could dance on the small stage.  The OOB impresario didn’t see himself as a producer, either; he was a café-owner who provided a place for others to work.  He seldom read scripts—a habit he shared with his friend and colleague Ellen Stewart of La MaMa—and determined the performance schedule according to the playwrights’ zodiac signs!  

Joe Cino insisted, in fact, that his coffeehouse wasn’t a theater, but a café.  “We’re not off-off-Broadway,” he proclaimed, “we’re in-cafe.”  According to Crespy’s OOB history, the Village Voice “never listed” productions at Caffe Cino in its theater section, but, until the coffeehouse’s demise, always with the cafés.  Once the Cino started doing play readings, momentum took over, and the Ur-theater of Off-Off-Broadway, as dramaturg and reviewer Cynthia Jenner dubbed it in the Cambridge Guide to American Theatre, pretty much created itself.  

[As I noted in my introduction above, “Caffe Cino” is a two-part post,  so I encourage all ROTters to return on Friday to read the final installment of the article.  So far, you’ve read about the start of the coffeehouse and the inauguration of Off-Off-Broadway; in the conclusion, you’ll learn about the café’s rise and its demise.  I hope you’ll also get an impression of the Caffe Cino’s importance at the time and its influence down to the present.]