August Wilson Theatre

The August Wilson Theatre is a two-level Broadway house on West 52nd Street, owned and operated by ATG Entertainment.

The name honors August Wilson (1945–2005), author of the Pittsburgh Cycle, ten plays about African American life across the 20th century, and a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, for Fences and The Piano Lesson. The theater took his name on October 16, 2005, two weeks after his death, and became the first on Broadway named for a Black playwright.

The building was made for the Theatre Guild, a subscription company founded in 1919 that had outgrown the Garrick Theatre. Governor Al Smith attended the groundbreaking in December 1924, and the Guild Theatre opened on April 13, 1925, when President Calvin Coolidge switched on its lights from the White House. The first play was George Bernard Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra with Helen Hayes and Lionel Atwill.

Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne starred in many Guild plays here, and 1931 brought Lynn Riggs's Green Grow the Lilacs and Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra. From 1943 radio station WOR used the auditorium as a studio. The American National Theater and Academy (ANTA) bought the building at auction in 1950, and President Harry S. Truman dedicated it as the ANTA Playhouse in 1951.

Work in 1953 and 1954 stripped nearly all of the original decor and raised capacity to 1,215 seats; the house was rededicated as the ANTA Theatre in December 1954. Its biggest success of that era was A Man for All Seasons, which opened in 1961 and gave 637 performances.

Jujamcyn Theaters, the company of James H. Binger and Virginia McKnight Binger, bought the theater in 1981 and renamed it the Virginia Theatre after her. In August 1985 the Landmarks Preservation Commission made the exterior a city landmark; the bare interior was left out. The new owners waited years for a hit: City of Angels finally delivered one, logging 878 performances from December 1989, and Smokey Joe's Cafe later added 2,036 performances between 1995 and 2000.

Jersey Boys opened in November 2005, just after the renaming, and kept the stage until January 2017. Its 4,642 performances more than doubled the total of Smokey Joe's Cafe. Mean Girls was still playing when Broadway shut down in March 2020. Audiences came back on August 4, 2021, for Pass Over, a play by Antoinette Nwandu. Jujamcyn merged with ATG in 2023.

C. Howard Crane and Kenneth Franzheim designed the theater with Charles H. Bettis; it is one of only two Broadway houses by Crane, the other being the Music Box Theatre. While most theaters of the period had Beaux-Arts classical fronts, the Guild was dressed as a 15th-century Tuscan villa: stucco walls edged with stone quoins, a tiled roof with deep eaves, five French windows with iron balconies and a small arched loggia.

Inside, the auditorium sits one floor above street level, and the original plan put a large lounge directly underneath it. The Guild skipped box seats and a conventional proscenium arch, which left a very wide stage opening. At 77 feet wide and 49 feet deep, the stage ranked fourth in size in New York City when the building opened.

A 1995 restoration by Campagna & Russo Architects, partly inspired by the Palazzo Davanzati, brought back much of the lost character, including a frieze, false balconies and a starry blue ceiling over the upper level.

A stair lift gives step-free access to the orchestra from the accessible entrance beside the box office, and staff will help you use it. Its weight limit is 500 pounds. Wheelchair spaces and companion seats are in the orchestra only, and some aisle seats have arms that lift or come off for transfers. Seats for patrons with vision or hearing needs are in the center of row D of the orchestra. No elevator serves the mezzanine.

An all-gender, single-stall accessible restroom is on the orchestra level. A booth in the main lobby lends free devices, which can be reserved ahead: infrared listening with headsets, neck loops or cochlear-implant-compatible headphones, Auracast broadcast audio, I-Caption captioning and D-Scriptive audio description.