Designed by Ingalls & Hoffman and built in 1912, the Little Theater’s neo-Colonial styling lent an air of charm and mild eccentricity to a Broadway then accustomed to a more formal Classical or Beaux-Arts design. Commissioned by Winthrop Ames, an independently wealthy producer with an architectural background and unusual ideas about drama, the Little Theater was designed to house the new, detailed type of drama called “intimate theater.”
The interior of this theatre, based on intimacy of scale and European innovations in form, is an unusual and special design that was specifically intended to suggest the intimate drama presented by Ames on its stage. The early balcony addition and ornamental alterations are sympathetic with other aspects of the theater’s design.