Caffe Cino, Part 2

[Welcome back to Rick On Theater for the second and final part of  “Caffe Cino,” my brief history of the Ur-theater of Off-Off-Broadway and its founder.  If you haven’t read Part 1, I recommend going back to the post on 11 September to read about the beginnings of Joe Cino’s Greenwich Village coffeehouse before picking up here with the café’s growth and final curtain.  (To read about  the milieu out of which the Caffe Cino was born, see my two-part article “Greenwich Village Theater in the 1960s,” posted on 12 and 15 December 2011.)]  

When Joe Cino arrived in New York City in the midst of a blizzard on 7 February 1948, he “didn’t have a dime,” he told Michael Smith of the Village Voice in 1965, “and I still don’t.”  In November 1958, he used the $400 in savings he’d accumulated after arriving in New York as the opening capital for the coffeehouse.  Until 1960, he continued to work at his day job at a laundry to support the café.  Cino needed little on which to subsist, and when he really needed cash, he’d move out of his apartment and sleep on a mattress in the back of the café.

Cino and the café’s staff took no salaries and he kept the costs low.  John Torrey, the Cino’s electrical genius, tapped into the city’s power system to supply the café with electricity—the lights in the café went on when the street lights did—and that helped keep overhead down immensely.  (When he opened the coffeehouse, Cino had neglected to hire a waiter.  When customers on that first night, mostly fiends of Joe’s, simply began to serve one another, it began a practice at the Cino of friends waiting on friends; there really never was a wait staff at the Cino--it was all volunteer.)  Unlike its competition, however, the Cino was a commercial enterprise, not a non-profit experimental theater, so it wasn’t eligible for the government grants and subsidies which sustained other OOB theaters.

Customers at the Cino were required to spend a dollar for coffee or pastries from the menu as the café’s minimum, but admission for the performances was virtually nil as the performers passed the hat (a basket, actually) after each show.  The artists could make maybe $15 each by the end of a week of performing (that’s about $125 today).  The productions had zero budgets (usually covered by the playwright or director; the most opulent show cost a little over $300 to mount)—Cino didn’t charge for the use of the room, but he also didn’t supply anything but the lights and electricity; there were, of course, no royalty payments to the writers.  Directors and designers relied on ingenuity and donated labor and goods—but no one complained.  It was, if you will, DIY theater, and playwright Robert Heide recalled, “For Joe, the doors were always open: do your own thing, do what you have to do, do what you want to do.”

The reigning spirit of the café was Joe Cino.  The coffeehouse reflected his personality, both for good and for ill.  Soon after the place opened, Ed Franzen, who’d really been looking for a studio for his own work, split—though one rumor is that Cino dumped him and assumed the storefront’s lease.  (Off-Off-Broadway’s first impresario soon took mad, volatile John Torrey as his on-and-off lover.)  Caffe Cino has been glorified as a place where theater artists could work without pressure, pretensions, or career-damaging consequences, “an island where our souls can play,” as Cino playwright Claris Nelson declared.  Adventurous theatergoers saw the Cino as a place to go to see the exciting edge of new theater, the kind of plays, both from writers and directors, that the commercially-minded producers of Broadway and Off-Broadway wouldn’t dare touch, the work of playwrights, directors, designers, and actors they didn’t know now, but who might be the Tennessee Williamses, Lillian Hellmans, George Abbotts, Harold Clurmans, Jo Mielziners, Donald Oenslagers, Laurence Oliviers, or Helen Hayeses of the new generation.  

Despite the assertions by some, as Crespy reports, “that the Cino was a place of great innocence and fervor, where passionate, idiosyncratic artists—gay or straight—were nurtured in an aesthetic environment that gave them total freedom to create,” he warned that that wasn’t the whole picture.  “For others, it was a dangerous place, a bacchanalia where drugs, sex, and death flowed freely, engendering a thrilling, yet terrifying, visceral theater.”  This, too, was a manifestation of Joe Cino’s character, though many Cino habitués contend that Andy Warhol’s circle was responsible for bringing drugs to the Cino.  (The artist himself began frequenting the coffeehouse in 1965.)  

Cino playwright Robert Heide recalled, “The Cino also sometimes operated as a kind of way-station for wild-eyed painters, actors who doubled as hustlers, and drug addicts who slept on the floor when they had no place else to go.”  He quipped, “Antonin Artaud [conceiver of the Theatre of Cruelty] would have felt right at home in this strange room, as would Alfred Jarry, Arthur Rimbaud, [English occultist] Alistair Crowley, and certainly, Oscar Wilde.”   

Cino himself had something of a mercurial personality.  (I have no credentials for making such a diagnosis, but descriptions of Cino’s behavior sound as if he might have been bipolar: sometimes giddy, even delirious, and then alternatively depressed and morose.)  It largely depended on which side of him you were on, whether you had his approval or his dismissal.  Joe Cino didn’t suffer those he thought were phonies or posers—and he let them know it.  Crespy describes the OOB impresario variously as “generous to a fault and sometimes petty and difficult” or “wild, dangerous, passionate.”  Cino’s supporters saw him as a kind of saint or a “nurturing angel” on a “holy artistic mission.”  On a tear, however, such as when he and his cohorts allegedly went out in drag to attract homophobic punks and then turned and beat them up, he looked “dark, wild-eyed, volatile.” Declared Crespy, “There was always an aura of craziness and danger about Joe.”  

Already addicted to amphetamines and taking LSD, over time Cino became obsessed with his increasing weight, which he blamed for his failure to achieve a career as a dancer, and his advancing age (he turned 30 in 1961); despondent over his up-and-down love life; discouraged by  the feeling he was forfeiting control of the Cino because of its growing popularity and fame; fearful of losing the coffeehouse due to increased costs, intensified scrutiny by city authorities, competition from other OOB outlets such as Café La MaMa, and changes in the theater environment, some of which were generated by the presence of Caffe Cino and its like.  Heide lamented that the “dark elements won out in the end.”  

Though it started with classic European scripts, the Cino’s reputation and significance to American theater was as a place for new works to be tried out, along with new staging and performing notions (although a lot of those were born more out of necessity than artistic innovation).  Despite the participation of so many neophyte actors, directors, and designers, the Cino developed into a playwrights’ theater, and OOB followed in that direction as it formed.  By 1963, almost every performance was a new American play.   

Many new and gifted playwrights, experimenting with radical forms of dramaturgy that clashed with contemporary commercial tastes, were discovered by way of Caffe Cino, not to forget Joe Cino’s imitators in the Village café-theater dodge.  (Many artists worked at both the Cino and La MaMa, as well as the other OOB theaters of the time.)  As it happens, the very time that Off-Off-Broadway was being born at Caffe Cino, Café La MaMa  (opened in 1961), the Judson Poets’ Theatre (1961), and the Theatre Genesis (1964)—the four founding theaters of OOB—Off-Broadway was changing from an inexpensive and innovative arena of informal atmosphere and small audiences into a commercial sphere with high costs, restrictive union rules, and demanding economics—a smaller version of Broadway.  The average cost of an Off-Broadway drama in the early 1960s had reached $20,000 (about $165,000 today).

One theater-besotted 19-year-old college student, in a dialogue he wrote in 1965 for a student magazine, asked “the spirit of . . . Joe Cino”: “Where do I go to see the NEW theatre—the people writing NOW?”  The young man was “looking for something fresh, something alive.  A theatre where writers can try things out, where there’s a possibility of affirmation.”  He’s transported magically to “off-off-Broadway” and “the Cino Café” where “[s]omething’s always new” and the as-yet-unknown playwrights are “trying to say something.”  As a consequence, Off-Off-Broadway simply took off because it was needed, both by theatergoers and by artists.  Caffe Cino was the vanguard.  New York Herald Tribune cultural critic (and Village resident) John Gruen described the theater scene at the Cino in an obituary for the OOB impresario:

Twice each night, and sometimes three times, the Caffe Cino presented the outrageous, the blasphemous, the zany, the wildly poetic, the embarrassingly trite, the childish, and frequently, the moving and the beautiful.

The first original play performed at Caffe Cino and, perhaps, the first true Off-Off-Broadway première, was James Howard’s anti-war satire about the arms race, Flyspray, presented in the summer of 1960.  This was followed by plays from Lanford Wilson (often credited with bringing “professional theater” to the Cino, till then a den of amateurism), Doric Wilson, Tom Eyen, Jean-Claude van Itallie, and Robert Patrick, and the work of directors like Marshall Mason and Tom O’Horgan and actors such as Al Pacino (who made his début for a paying audience in William Saroyan’s Hello Out There in 1962 or ’63), Harvey Keitel, and Bernadette Peters was first seen at Joe Cino’s coffeehouse.  

The Cino made another important contribution to New York life, American theater, and the nation’s culture.  In a way, it happened almost by accident—or, more precisely, circumstances.  Before the Stonewall uprising in 1969, it was illegal in New York State to depict homosexuality on stage.  (The law, the Wales Padlock Act, was passed in 1927 and remained on the books until 1967.)  But many of the artists, especially the playwrights, who patronized and worked in Caffe Cino were gay so the coffeehouse became a congenial and safe hangout for gay men, especially, to meet.  Almost surreptitiously, the Cino became a pioneer in gay theater as many of the new plays featured gay themes, subjects, and characters.  (Along with Stonewall, Caffe Cino is considered a landmark of U.S. LGBTQ history.  The Stonewall’s still here; the Cino’s not.)  

Of course, the Cino was already breaking another law the moment it started presenting performances of any kind: New York City’s cabaret law.  Businesses that wanted to put on a show had to have a liquor license (even though Caffe Cino didn’t serve booze) and a cabaret license.  (The same was true of places that wanted to allow patrons to dance.)  Joe Cino had neither for his coffeehouse.  (This is why Ellen Stewart eventually called her house the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club.  Patrons didn’t pay an admission fee, but bought memberships in the private club—which didn’t need a  license to present a performance.)  To help deter the police—who might fail to enforce Wales but would close a joint for putting on an unlicensed play—from interfering, Cino plastered the front widows with posters to obscure the view from the sidewalk.  

The posters themselves, designed by Cino artist Kenneth Burgess, were lettered in what Crespy labeled “a purposely indecipherable art nouveau style—later known as psychedelic,” which the New York City authorities like cops and site inspectors couldn’t read but Cino regulars could, all to disguise the goings-on inside the coffeehouse.  To the uninitiated, the posters looked like abstract art.  (It was like a visual version of the sound frequency only people under 25 can hear.  If you were hip, you got the message; if you were square, you didn’t.)

The Cino  was a magnet, drawing wanderers, seekers, hippies, theater enthusiasts, gays, and all kinds of counterculture Americans (and foreign visitors).  Early on the morning of 3 March 1965, however, disaster nearly struck as a fire, believed to have started from a gas leak (though Joe Cino was convinced that it was started by his estranged and volatile lover John Torrey) gutted the first-floor storefront.  Ironically, the fire occurred on Ash Wednesday.  For 2½ months, Joe Cino’s café operated out of Ellen Stewart’s La MaMa in the East Village (located at 122 2nd Avenue, between 7th and 8th Streets, at the time) on Sunday and Monday nights; other downtown theater people hosted or participated in fundraisers and benefits for Cino and his coffeehouse.  (Edward Albee, already an established playwright so he never wrote for the Cino, was nevertheless an enthusiastic booster of the café theater and donated the space for the largest event in benefit for Caffe Cino.)  

A newly-installed fireproof ceiling at the Cino, put in when a lighting grid was added, prevented the fire from spreading beyond the commercial space, saving the building from damage and confining the destruction to the interior of the Cino.  On Tuesday, 18 May 1965, the coffeehouse reopened with a production of With Creatures Make My Way by H. M. (Haralimbus Medea, known as Harry) Koutoukas, whose plays, wrote Crespy, “personify the Cino and are emblematic of the curious mix of highbrow avant-garde and lowdown pop culture that became its signature style.”  A new drop ceiling was installed, along with expanded space for dressing rooms; even a compact lighting booth was built during the reconstruction.  The famous memorabilia-covered walls had to be re-decorated from scratch, but they quickly regained their familiar look.  That same year, Caffe Cino and Café La MaMa were jointly awarded a Village Voice OBIE Award “for creating opportunities for new playwrights to confront audiences and gain experience of the real theatre” during the 1964-65 season.

The next year, on 19 May 1966, the Cino’s most successful production opened, helping to change OOB forever after.  Dames at Sea or Golddiggers Afloat—known afterward simply as Dames at Sea—with book and lyrics by George Haimsohn and Robin Miller and music by Jim Wise and directed by Cino regular Robert Dahdah ran at the café theater for 148 performances.  Then it moved to Off-Broadway’s  Bouwerie Lane Theatre in the East Village on 20 December 1968 and transferred to the larger Theatre de Lys (now the Lucille Lortel Theatre) in the West Village on 22 April 1969 and closed on 10 May 1970 after a total of 575 performances.  (There was a television version which aired on NBC on 15 November 1971 and a later Broadway production at the Helen Hayes Theatre from 22 October 2015 to 3 January 2016, running 85 regular performances and 32 previews.  There was also a London run in 1969 and a cast recording of the Off-Broadway staging released that same year.)  

The central role of Ruby in Dames was played, both at Caffe Cino and in the  OB première, by future Broadway star Bernadette Peters; her 1968 OB performance brought her her first Drama Desk Award.  (Peters also reprised her role in regional productions at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, New Jersey, in 1973 and at the Academy Playhouse, Lake Forest, Illinois, in 1973.  Many other regional productions have been staged since the play’s début; Dames at Sea’s been very popular in schools and community theaters.)

As momentous an achievement as Dames at Sea was for Caffe Cino, it also marked the beginning of the end.  While working on a stock production in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, John (sometimes written “Jon” in the press) Torrey (sometimes spelled “Torre”), Joe Cino’s on-again-off-again lover, was electrocuted on 5 January 1967 and died.  Some suspected it was a suicide, but many others believe the sometime Cino lighting expert had been performing his signature gag of “eating” electricity and it went horribly wrong.  To demonstrate that electricity isn’t to be feared, he’d lick his fingers  and grab the end of an electric line, causing the cable to throw sparks. When the electricity arced off his fingers, he made as if he was eating it.  Cino was devastated by Torrey’s death and descended into despondency.  

Torrey’s death sent Cino into an emotional spiral.  Late on 30 March 1967, he returned alone to the coffeehouse, took a kitchen knife, and hacked at his body, stabbing himself in the stomach, enacting a bizarre sort of harakiri dance.  He managed to call Johnny Dodd and Michael Smith’s apartment at 5 Cornela Street (likely before he inflicted the mortal wound) and got Smith, the Voice journalist, on the phone.  Cino sounded so desperate that Smith rushed to the café and found Cino, still alive in a pool of blood.  Smith ran for help and Cino was taken to St. Vincent’s Hospital, a Catholic hospital in the Village, where Al Carmines of Judson Poets and Ellen Stewart of La MaMa kept vigil.  He died on 2 April—Torrey’s birthday.  Bernadette Peters, the  sensation of Dames at Sea, sang a song from the play at his memorial service on 10 April at the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square, the home of Al Carmines’s Judson Poets’ Theatre, along with other downtown performers and artists performing scenes, readings, and more songs from Cino plays.  (Joe Cino had been buried in Buffalo, his birthplace and home of his mother, on 7 April.)

Caffe Cino reopened in May under the management of Michael Smith and others, and it lasted another year.  But Joe Cino had been the living spirit of Caffe Cino and without him at the helm, or the espresso machine, “Magic Time” was never the same.  The coffeehouse closed for good on 17 March 1968; the last play at the Cino was Monuments by Diane Di Prima.  In 1985, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center (then known as the Library and Museum of the Performing Arts) mounted Caffe Cino and its Legacy: An American Cultural Landmark, an exhibition of memorabilia and ephemera, and playwright Robert Patrick had a plaque mounted on the front of the commercial space at 31 Cornelia Street on 28 April 2008, just under 50 years after Joe Cino opened his coffeehouse: “On this site, in the Caffe Cino (1958-68), artists brought theatre into the modern era, creating Off-Off Broadway and forever altering the performing arts worldwide.”  (Sometime in May 2017, the plaque was anonymously removed.)

Joe Cino’s café theater, the first OOB theater, had lasted for just under 10 years, but its impact on New York and American theater has been everlasting.  During its decade of operation, the Cino presented somewhere around 250 plays.  Cino had a dark side and came to a tragic end, and all wasn’t all beer and skittles at the coffeehouse, but the café-owner isn’t remembered for that.  He’s enshrined in New York and theater history for his contributions as a wizard for working with artists, providing an atmosphere of complete artistic freedom to experiment, innovate, challenge established standards—even fail—and generating a new theater forum for work that would otherwise never see a stage or an audience.  In 1985, Ellen Stewart insisted, “It was Joseph Cino who started Off-Off-Broadway.  I would like to ask everybody to remember that.” 

Joe Cino was the first of the founders of OOB to depart: Ralph Cook (b. 1928), founder of Theatre Genesis, died in 1985; Al Camines (b. 1936) passed on in 2005; and La MaMa herself, Ellen Stewart (b. 1919), was the last survivor, dying in 2011.  Off-Off-Broadway thrives in New York City—including La MaMa E.T.C., the only one of the four founding OOB theaters still in operation.  Similar small spaces live in cities across the country, and American playwriting still feels the ripples of what Joe Cino and his followers started 60 years ago in a little corner of New York.  On 11 November 2017, 31 Cornelia Street, the Cino’s home, was officially listed on the National Register of Historic Places.