The Alley Theatre is a Tony Award-winning indoor theatre in Downtown Houston, Texas, and hosts two stages. The "Hubbard" is the main stage with seating for 774; the more intimate "Neuhaus" seats 310. Nine towers and open-air terraces give the Alley Theatre a castle-like quality. Inside, a staircase spirals from the entrance vestibule to the second-floor lobby. A truly wide variety of plays have been performed in this theater.HistoryThe Alley Theatre is one of the three oldest resident theatres in the United States. Under the leadership of Nina Eloise Whittington Vance (1914–1980), the Alley Theatre first started in a “former dance studio with an opening on Main Street. A brick corridor led from Main to the back of the studio, hence the name Alley Theatre.” In 1948, early paying members scouted Houston for a new location for the Alley, finally landing on an abandoned fan factory on Berry Avenue. The Alley re-opened on February 8, 1949, with a production of Lillian Helman’s The Children’s Hour. In 1954, Ms. Vance brought in Albert Dekker to ‘guest-star’ in Death of a Salesman. The Alley then became a fully professional/Equity company.The Alley Theatre was invited by the United States State Department to represent the American Regional Theatre at the Brussels World’s Fair in 1958.In 1962, the Houston Endowment gifted land worth $800,000 and grants worth $2.5 million were awarded to the Alley from the Ford Foundation for the new building at 615 Texas Ave. In the summer of 1963, the theatre raised more than $900,000 from Houstonians. These funds helped the theatre grow from its modest beginnings into one of the most prestigious non-profit resident theatres in the United States.