Off Off-Broadway is theatre without theatres, but it accounts for the most adventurous and promising work now being done in New York. Half a dozen plays or more, most of them by new playwrights, are produced every month on Off Off-Broadway's four principal stages. Many of the actors and directors are amateurs, students, or novices trying their wings; others are trained professionals who, finding few occasions to work and almost no chance to develop as artists within the professional theatre, are opting out of the system. They can—and sometimes do—work in the new regional theatres. But New York is still the center of the arts in America: someplace has to be.

Off Off-Broadway began as entertainment in coffee houses. The Caffe Cino was producing plays regularly as early as 1959, and various other Greenwich Village cafés had occasionally presented theatre to their customers.