Circle in the Square Theatre

Circle in the Square Theatre is a compact Broadway house built around a thrust stage. Instead of facing a picture-frame opening at the far end of a hall, the audience sits on three sides of the playing area. Only one other Broadway venue, the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center, works this way. The room lies below street level inside Paramount Plaza, the office tower at 1633 Broadway that also contains the far larger Gershwin Theatre.

This is the Broadway home of Circle in the Square, a company that Theodore Mann, José Quintero and four other partners started in Greenwich Village. Their first stage, at 5 Sheridan Square, was a theater in the round, and the name joins that circular layout to the address. The complex also houses the Circle in the Square Theatre School, founded in 1961; it is the one accredited drama conservatory tied to a Broadway house, and Kevin Bacon and Philip Seymour Hoffman trained there.

The company opened its first downtown space in 1951 and in 1960 relocated to Circle in the Square Downtown at 159 Bleecker Street. The uptown theater grew out of a 1967 zoning change, the Special Theater District amendment, which rewarded developers with extra floor space if their towers included new playhouses. The Uris Building, today called Paramount Plaza, went up on the site of the old Capitol Theatre, and a second, smaller theater in its basement became the Circle's new home.

The new house opened on November 15, 1972, as the Circle in the Square-Joseph E. Levine Theatre, named for a longtime patron. The first production was a revival of Mourning Becomes Electra starring Colleen Dewhurst. For roughly 25 years the Circle ran the space as a nonprofit producing theater backed by subscribers, and across its producing years it mounted more than 150 shows. In 1976 the company received a Special Tony Award honoring its first quarter century.

By the 1990s the Circle was running a deficit, and after a bankruptcy the board suspended operations in June 1997. The theater came back in February 1999 with Not About Nightingales, now as an independent commercial house that books productions from outside producers. Paul Libin, who had joined the Circle as managing director in 1963, stayed on as president until he died in June 2025.

The longest run in the building belongs to The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, which gave 1,136 performances between May 2005 and January 2008. Other notable tenants have included Metamorphoses in 2002, Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill with Audra McDonald in 2014, the Best Musical winner Fun Home in 2015, Tony-winning revivals of Once on This Island and Oklahoma!, and An Enemy of the People with Jeremy Strong in 2024. The theater went dark on March 12, 2020, because of the COVID-19 pandemic and reopened on September 23, 2021, with Chicken & Biscuits.

Allen Sayles designed the auditorium, and Jules Fisher created its lighting system. The space was first conceived as an off-Broadway room with fewer than 500 seats. Mann and Libin pushed it to Broadway size by shifting structural columns and trading stairs for ramps, and it opened with 650 seats.

Originally the seats were red, and a red-and-gray checkerboard carpet covered the floor, with the company's cube emblem repeated in the carpet pattern and the light fixtures. Soundproof panels were fitted overhead, and the control booth at the rear was soundproofed too.

There are no steps between the entrance and the box office. The seating area is one flight down; take the escalator or ask a staff member for the elevator. You enter the orchestra from behind row K, and the four wheelchair locations are in row J and row K.

Assistive listening devices, plus neck loops for hearing aids with a t-coil, can be borrowed at the Audience Services kiosk; bring a driver's license or other ID with a printed address. Handheld audio description and personal captioning devices become available 30 days after a show's official opening. Restrooms are one flight down in the lower lobby, and staff can take you by elevator to an accessible restroom.