Eugene O'Neill Theatre

The Eugene O'Neill Theatre is a mid-sized Broadway house on West 49th Street, just north of Times Square. Published seat counts range from 1,047 to 1,108 on two levels, and it has housed both musicals and straight plays. ATG Entertainment owns and operates it.

The name honors Eugene O'Neill (1888–1953), the American dramatist who won the Nobel Prize and four Pulitzer Prizes. Renamed for him in 1959, it was the first Broadway house to carry a playwright's name. It opened as the Forrest Theatre, honoring the 19th-century actor Edwin Forrest (1806–1872); from 1945 to 1959 it was the Coronet Theatre.

The Shubert brothers planned six new playhouses on 48th and 49th Streets after World War I. Four were built and three survive: the Ambassador, the Walter Kerr and this one. The Forrest rose beside a 15-story hotel of the same name, and its first show, the musical Mayflowers, opened on November 24, 1925.

Early bookings mostly flopped. In the Depression, a door from the orchestra into the hotel bar was a perk no other Broadway house had, yet the property went to a foreclosure auction in 1934. That year Tobacco Road moved in; by 1941 it had played 3,182 performances, then a Broadway record.

After serving as a radio studio in 1944, it was bought in 1945 by Louis Lotito's City Playhouse Theatres and remodeled as the Coronet. Arthur Miller's All My Sons (1947) and A View from the Bridge (1955) played here. In 1959 the owner, Lester Osterman, gave it its present name.

Neil Simon became a part owner in 1964 and sole owner in 1967, and made it a home for his own plays, among them The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1971) and California Suite (1976). Jujamcyn Theaters bought the house in 1982. Later long runs included Big River (1985, 1,005 performances) and a Grease revival (1994, 1,503 performances). The Book of Mormon opened on March 24, 2011, and as of October 2026 holds the house record for longevity. Jujamcyn and ATG merged in 2023.

A three-alarm fire in an electrical room on May 4, 2026, stopped performances for about three weeks.

Herbert J. Krapp, the Shuberts' architect for nearly all their theaters after World War I, designed both playhouse and hotel. Pairing them was new for Times Square, and the theater's structural steel frame was unusual at a time when steel was mostly used for skyscrapers.

In 1945 the original brick and terracotta gave way to brightly painted stucco, shutters and an iron balcony meant to suggest a New Orleans house, a remodel by Walker & Gillette. Since 1980 the facade has been limestone, now painted, with a large iron balcony.

Inside, the room is wider than it is deep and decorated in the Adam style, an 18th-century British manner of shallow plaster ornament. Rope moldings and a band of fruit and flowers frame the five-centered proscenium arch, and on each side the boxes sit inside an elliptical arch. Look up for the coved ceiling, with medallions of classical figures around a central ring of masks and swags, and its five crystal chandeliers. The palette went from red and gold (1925) to blue and gray (1945) to purple and gold after a 1994 restoration by Campagna & Russo Architects, who used old photographs to recreate lost plasterwork. The city's Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the interior a landmark on December 8, 1987.

There is no step between the sidewalk and the orchestra, and all wheelchair, aisle-transfer and companion seats are on that level; only row T is one step up. With no elevator or escalator, the mezzanine is stairs only. Seats for guests with vision or hearing loss are held in row B, center orchestra.

Free devices (D-Scriptive audio description, I-Caption captioning, infrared headsets, induction neck loops, and Showtrans translation in Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish) are available at the headset desk in the orchestra bar's lobby. For an accessible, single-stall or all-gender restroom, staff will direct you to The Time Hotel next door at 224 West 49th Street.