Caffe Cino

Joseph Cino (November 16, 1931 – April 2, 1967), was an Italian-American theatrical producer and café-owner. The beginning of the Off-Off-Broadway theatre movement is generally credited to have begun at Cino’s Caffe Cino.

In 1958, retired dancer Joe Cino rented a storefront at 31 Cornelia Street in New York City's Greenwich Village in order to open a coffeehouse in which his friends could socialize. So intimate was his clientele that he and those customers in his inner circle actually created their own patois, a mixture of Italian and English. Not originally intending that Caffe Cino would become a theatrical venue, Cino instead visualized a café where he could host folk music concerts, poetry readings, and art exhibits. Actor/director Bill Mitchell says it was he who suggested that Cino add plays to the performance mix. Dated photographs show that plays were staged on his coffeehouse’s floor from at least December 1958, after 1960 usually directed by actor/director Bob Dahdah. Cino at first saw theatre as just another kind of event to host. (Color photo of the Cino by James D. Gossage.)

Painting and literature are comparatively inexpensive arts which individuals such as the late 19th and early 20th centuries Realist writers and Impressionist painters could afford to experiment with, whether their works were accepted or not, but theatre requires a space and collaborators, and is a public art subject to the scrutiny of church, state, and the press. At the Caffe Cino, which made its meager living not from public approval of the work it presented, but from selling food and drink, where no one was paid except the police who were paid off, where reviewers seldom came (and reviews were usually published after a show had closed), theatre effectively entered the Modern era which the other arts had entered a hundred years before. Dozens and then more dozens of theatres appeared, based on the Cino model, in places which made their living other ways—cafes, bars, art galleries, and churches. To distinguish it from Broadway (large Equity theatres) and Off-Broadway (smaller Equity theatres), this new outside/underground theatre world came to be known as "Off-Off-Broadway." For the first time in history, the stage could be an area of primary expression, rebellion, novelty, and a vehicle for social and aesthetic change—in a word, unpopular. As a novelist has described it: "Off-Off-Broadway: The first place in human history where theatre is treated as the equal of the other arts, as a thing responsible and important above popularity ratings, outside monetary concerns, beyond academic and legal restrictions: The first studio of theater where playwrights can experiment as painters and poets have done for a century, free from the tyranny of audience, box-office, church, and criticism."

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