DOWNTOWN—The Cherry Lane Theatre, at 38 Commerce Street, belongs to a particular New York category: the small room that outlives its scale. Its history runs through F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Luigi Pirandello, Samuel Beckett, and Tennessee Williams, according to archived versions of the theater’s website. Beckett’s Happy Days had its world premiere there in 1961.

A24 purchased The Cherry Lane Theatre in 2023 for a little over $10 million, according to The Hollywood Reporter, and has since renovated the seating, upgraded the technical systems, added a film projector and screen, and improved the concessions kiosk. The revived space also includes Wild Cherry, a restaurant and bar curated by the Frenchette Group, whose restaurants include Frenchette, Le Rock, and Le Veau. The restaurant is as beautiful as it is small. Dinner is expensive, with a very basic salad listed at $35, but it is an excellent place for cocktails, and the staff is unusually friendly.

The reopening of the theater arrives inside a broader return to smaller cultural rooms: places where film, theater, comedy, music, food, and audience ritual can overlap without becoming anonymous. Netflix’s stewardship of the Paris Theatre, Audible’s production partnership with Minetta Lane, and the continued draw of Metrograph and the Roxy all suggest the same thing. In a city full of screens, the room itself has become valuable again.

Cherry Lane’s next life is therefore not simply a reopening. It is a test of what a historic downtown theater can be now: part cinema, part stage, part neighborhood address, and part cultural object. So, yes, a small theater can still concentrate attention in a way larger institutions often cannot.