The Flea Theater
non-profit organization in the USA
The Flea Theater is a theater in the TriBeCa neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City, New York, U.S. It presents primarily experimental theatre by Black, brown, and queer artists, as well as a venue for film stars to act on a 74-seat stage. The theater was founded in 1996 by Jim Simpson, Sigourney Weaver, Mac Wellman, and Kyle Chepulis. The Flea earned early acclaim for original productions of post-9/11 play The Guys and political works by A. R. Gurney. According to The New York Times, "Since its inception in 1996, The Flea has presented over 100 plays and numerous dance and live music performances. Under Artistic Director Jim Simpson and Producing Director Carol Ostrow, The Flea is one of New York's leading off-off-Broadway companies."
History
Founded in 1996, the award-winning Flea Theater was originally formed to create, according to the theatre's website, “a joyful hell in a small space”. The Flea receives over 17,000 visitors each year. In March 2015, The Flea announced that Niegel Smith would be taking over for Jim Simpson as its new artistic director.
Production highlights include The Guys by Anne Nelson, starring Sigourney Weaver and Bill Murray. Additional productions include Oh the Humanity and Other Exclamations, by Pulitzer finalist Will Eno, starring Marisa Tomei and Brian Hutchison. This collection of five short plays extended through winter 2008.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “The Flea Theater” is non-profit organization in the USA. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Flea, Theater and non-profit, not as a finished interpretation.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7734400. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1996, 2015 and 2008.
Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Three-step research path
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This entry incorporates text from “The Flea Theater” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.