The Playhouse Theatre

The round stage on Main Street had a Texas pedigree. Margo Jones, who ran the Houston Community Players from 1936 to 1942, opened Theatre '47 in Dallas in June 1947, which the Handbook calls the country's first professional arena theater, and her 1951 book Theatre-in-the-Round spread the idea. In Houston, Nina Vance's Players Guild had staged plays in the round at the Rice and Lamar hotels between 1945 and 1947, before she founded the Alley. There is a thread to the 1953 production too: in 1943 Jones had directed You Touched Me, written by Tennessee Williams and Donald Windham.

What the plaque says

The Playhouse Theatre The Playhouse Theatre, built in 1950 at 4816 Main Street, was the brainchild of stage manager Joanna Albus and attorney William Rozan. It was one of the first theatres in the country specifically constructed for "theatre in the round," a concept that enables the audience to surround the players, who perform on a central stage. Architect Benjamin Greenwood's unique design featured a circular space with 300 seats situated around a twenty-two foot circular stage with a revolving mechanism. Albus and Rozan were producers and managing directors, and also headed the investment group. The duo planned to operate the theatre year-round with performance runs tailored to public response. Performances included six weekly evening shows and matinees on Saturday and Sunday. Other uses included lectures, musicals and dance events on free evenings. The playhouse opened on February 21, 1951 with a performance of the comedy Candlelight. For the next three years, the company continued to turn out high quality productions. Distinguished American playwright and director Tennessee Williams directed Donald Windham's The Starless Air in 1953. Despite good reviews, high overhead began to eat into profits, forcing Albus and Rozan to close the theatre in 1954. Several later owners kept it open as either a live performance venue or a movie house until 2004, when the National African American Museum was opened inside the space. The playhouse earned international recognition and sparked an evolution of arena-type venues and other theatres in Houston, some of which still exist today. (2010)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston — 0.5 mi
  The oldest art museum in Texas, grown from a 1900 schoolroom art league into a campus of Watkin, Mies van der Rohe and later buildings, with Ima Hogg's Bayou Bend up the bayou.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 0.6 mi
  A museum in Houston's 1925 Light Guard Armory that tells the service of Black soldiers from the Revolutionary War onward, built from one veteran's thirty years of collecting.
• Rothko Chapel — 0.8 mi
  An octagonal chapel open to all faiths, built by the de Menils around fourteen dark canvases by Mark Rothko, with Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk standing in the pool outside.
• The Menil Collection — 0.9 mi
  John and Dominique de Menil's free museum in Montrose: a grey-sided Renzo Piano building among bungalows, holding antiquities, Surrealism and art of Oceania under natural light.

More markers nearby

• Maurice Joseph Sullivan — 0.2 mi
• First Presbyterian Church of Houston — 0.3 mi
• W. L. and Susan Clayton — 0.4 mi
• St. Paul's United Methodist Church — 0.4 mi