Poster for the Caffe Cino production of The Madness of Lady Bright

Joe Cino opened his intimate café and theater 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 for an influential decade. Playwright Lanford Wilson’s The Madness of Lady Bright was a commercial and critical success at the Cino, and one of the first American plays to present a gay man as a sympathetic, compelling character rather than as a caricature or figure of ridicule. Counterculture artist Ken Burgess designed this poster, using collage to suggest Lady Bright’s mental breakdown. Caffe Cino closed in 1968 following its founder’s death, and it is now recognized as the birthplace of Off-Off-Broadway theatre.