Poster for the Caffe Cino production of Carlos Among the Candles

Joe Cino (1931–1967) opened his intimate café and theatre in a small storefront on Cornelia Street in Greenwich Village in 1958. Operating at the fringes of legality, the café hosted Joe’s lively group of friends—playwrights, poets, actors, designers, dancers, and bon vivants—and nurtured radical, makeshift, LGBTQ-friendly experimental theatre and performing arts during an influential decade. The poet Wallace Stevens’s early 20th-century monologue, Carlos Among the Candles, was presented in 1966 at the height of the theatre’s vitality. This poster—one of many designed for the theatre by the counterculture artist Ken Burgess—uses collage and off-kilter lettering to visually express the dynamic and experimental nature of Caffe Cino’s offerings. The theatre closed in 1968 following its founder’s death. It is now recognized as the birthplace of Off-Off-Broadway theatre.