East Village, in Manhattan
Paradise Factory Theater
Art Space Screening Program · 64 E 4th St
An off-off-Broadway nonprofit on East 4th Street that the actor Tom Noonan founded in 1983 inside a condemned ice cream factory.
The building had housed the Paradise Ice Cream Factory and was condemned when Noonan and Jack Kruger began petitioning the city to let them turn it into a theater. The name stayed with it.
Noonan staged original work here for decades and taught acting and writing alongside it. Three of his films, What Happened Was, The Wife and Wang Dang, started as plays on this stage.
The company still runs an open mic that gives anyone five minutes for whatever they are working on, and staged readings here have gone on to become features.
