[1] The building was constructed as a farm silo in 1817, and also served as a brewery, tobacco warehouse and box factory before Evelyn Vaughn, William S. Rainey, Reginald Travers & Edna St. Vincent Millay converted the structure into a theater they christened the Cherry Lane Playhouse.

[3] This was followed by the plays The Man Who Ate Popomack, by W. J. Turner, directed by Reginald Travers, on March 24, 1924; and The Way of the World by William Congreve, produced by the Cherry Lane Players Inc., opening November 17, 1924.

Occasionally the theatre even hosted musical performances, providing a venue for Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger long before their ascensions to fame.

[5] A succession of major American plays were produced at the theater, by writers including F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, and Elmer Rice in the 1920s;[3] Eugene O'Neill, Seán O'Casey, Clifford Odets, W. H. Auden, Gertrude Stein, Luigi Pirandello, and William Saroyan in the 1940s;[6] Samuel Beckett, Pablo Picasso, T. S. Eliot, Jean Anouilh, and Tennessee Williams in the 1950s;[7] Harold Pinter, LeRoi Jones, Eugène Ionesco, Terrence McNally, Lanford Wilson, and Lorraine Hansberry, in the 1960s, as well as Edward Albee, staging a large number of his plays;[8] and Sam Shepard, Joe Orton and David Mamet in the 1970s and 1980s.

Gurney, David Henry Hwang, Craig Lucas, and Theresa Rebeck; and Obie Award winners Ed Bullins and Lynn Nottage, as mentors.

[21][22] Productions staged at the Cherry Lane include The Rimers of Eldritch, Claudia Shear's Blown Sideways Through Life, Fortune's Fool with Alan Bates and Frank Langella, The Sum of Us with Tony Goldwyn, the Richard Maltby Jr./David Shire musical Closer Than Ever, Sam Shepard's True West, Joe Orton's Entertaining Mr. Sloane, Edward Albee's The Zoo Story, John-Michael Tebelak and Stephen Schwartz's Godspell, Paul Osborn's Morning's at Seven, Laura Pedersen's The Brightness of Heaven (later changed to For Heaven's Sake!