Poster for the Caffe Cino production of Donovan’s Johnson

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 bons vivants—and nurtured radical, makeshift, LGBTQ-friendly experimental theatre and performing arts during an influential decade. The playwright Søren Agenoux got his start at the Cino, and his second play, Donovan’s Johnson, was presented there in April 1967, just a month after Joe Cino’s tragic death. 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, which closed in 1968, is now recognized as the birthplace of Off-Off-Broadway theatre.