Hayes Theater

The Hayes Theater on West 44th Street is the smallest house on Broadway, with 597 seats on two levels. It belongs to Second Stage Theater, a nonprofit that bought it in 2015 and stages plays and musicals by contemporary American writers.

The name honors the actress Helen Hayes. Built in 1912 as the Little Theatre, the house took its current short name when it reopened in 2018. Children under five are not admitted.

The producer Winthrop Ames built the Little Theatre for intimate drama, taking his cue from small playhouses he had seen in Europe. It opened in March 1912 with John Galsworthy's The Pigeon in a single-level room of only 299 seats, one short of the size at which a fire-department rule would have required exit alleys on both sides. With so few seats, even its hits lost money, and in 1920 a balcony designed by Herbert J. Krapp turned it into the two-level theater of today.

The New York Times Company bought the building in 1931 and later ran it as a meeting space called New York Times Hall. Broadcasting followed: ABC made television there from 1951, including The Dick Clark Show, and Westinghouse Broadcasting later taped The Merv Griffin Show and The David Frost Show on its stage. A 1964 switch to the name Winthrop Ames Theatre was undone in 1965.

Plays came back in 1974. Albert Innaurato's Gemini arrived in 1977 and stayed for 1,819 performances; as of October 2026, no production has run longer in this building. Harvey Fierstein's Torch Song Trilogy opened in 1982, and in July 1983 the theater was renamed for Helen Hayes, whose earlier namesake on 46th Street had been torn down for the New York Marriott Marquis. On November 17, 1987, the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission protected the facade, foyer and auditorium.

Later tenants included The Last Night of Ballyhoo (1997), Xanadu (2007) and Rock of Ages, which transferred in 2011 and stayed nearly four years. Second Stage opened its first show here, Kenneth Lonergan's Lobby Hero, in 2018. Its productions of Take Me Out and Appropriate won the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play in 2022 and 2024, and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's Purpose took both the Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2025.

Ingalls & Hoffman (Harry Creighton Ingalls and Francis Burrall Hoffman Jr.) designed it in the neo-Georgian manner, then common for houses and rare for theaters, so the building would read as a colonial-era home. The red brick front, laid in Flemish bond with limestone trim, is asymmetrical: the entrance sits at the east end inside a brick arch framed by paired Corinthian columns, under a stone plaque with the original name, 1912 in Roman numerals and two carved dancers. Shuttered sash windows on the two upper floors and curved metal balconies on the second finish the domestic effect.

Adam-style reliefs decorate the lobby, whose barrel-vaulted foyer has a chandelier, Ionic columns and a staircase at each end. In the auditorium, the flat plaster ceiling from 1912 survives, built around an oval panel decorated with cherubs and women and hung with chandeliers. Since 2018 the side walls have carried a blue, pixel-like mural that recalls the tapestries once hung there. Toward the balcony's front edge, each side wall has two arched openings: one is an emergency exit, the other a window that let Ames keep an eye on the house from his office.

The 2018 renovation, designed by the Rockwell Group, added an elevator, new restrooms and modern mechanical systems, relocated the dressing rooms upstairs and turned the basement into a lounge with concessions, earning LEED Gold certification. The Harris Levin Bar opens an hour before curtain and again at intermission.

The box office and main lobby entrance have steps, so wheelchair users come in through the stage door entrance. An elevator links the lower lobby with the mezzanine, and accessible restrooms are on the lower lobby and mezzanine levels. The orchestra has a single step to a ramped aisle; mezzanine seats are reached by stairs.

For guests with hearing loss, Second Stage lists a hearing-loop system that sends stage sound to hearing aids and cochlear implants with a telecoil; ask the box office to confirm it is in use. Each production also schedules one open-captioned and one audio-described performance; call the box office for the dates.