Although the Théâtre Montparnasse began as a commercial playhouse for melodramatic fare, it occasionally leased its stage to new experimentalist plays of the Independent Theatre movement.

A year after the theatre's opening, Hartmann readily agreed to lease his stage to André Antoine, whose revolutionary new company, the Théâtre Libre, had, in spring 1887, earned immediate publicity as an exciting venture devoted to producing new plays.

The season's most resounding success was the French premiere of Tolstoy's The Power of Darkness on 10 February 1888, which led to a rare sold-out repeat performance eight days later.

[3] By contrast, on 16 January 1891, Paul Fort's Théâtre d'Art presented a failed, five-and-a-half-hour production of Shelley's The Cenci in French translation.

Schmidt and Hullot introduced many English talents to the French stage, including such authors and actors as Harold Pinter, Peter Shaffer, Noël Coward, Arnold Wesker, and Murray Schisgal.