The Vivian Beaumont Theater becomes the center of an evening transformed by the 1977 New York City blackout. A scheduled visit to see Irene Worth in The Cherry Orchard instead unfolds in darkness, as the cast continues by candlelight and the audience decides whether to stay or leave. The episode gives the theater a distinct role: not merely the place where a play is staged, but a public space where performance carries on through sudden disruption.

The planned visit

Mark Ginsburg had arranged an interview with Irene Worth for that evening, and the plan was to meet at the Vivian Beaumont Theater and see her play, The Cherry Orchard, first. The diary singles out Worth’s voice as the essential quality of her performance, describing what she says as sounding like real acting. The evening begins as a theater visit and professional appointment, with the interview still ahead.

A performance in darkness

When the lights went down, Andy Warhol initially thought the act had ended. Instead, the blackout had interrupted the theater’s normal conditions without stopping the play. The actors continued in the dark, and the actress playing the daughter urged the audience, “Isn’t this fun? Let’s keep going!” A man then explained that anyone wishing to leave would be shown out, while the performance would continue with men onstage holding candles. The theater’s sudden choice was practical as well as theatrical: spectators could depart, but the show would go on for those who stayed.

The cast’s composure made the interruption feel like an occasion for which performers had been waiting. Warhol described them as real troupers and the moment as a chance to make the show go on. The blackout did not simply suspend the performance; it altered its means, making the actors’ continued presence and the candlelight part of the night’s defining spectacle.

Backstage and beyond

After the play, Warhol and Ginsburg walked backstage to see Worth. A man there called it “the most thrilling thing that’s happened to me, passing Andy Warhol in the dark.” Worth changed into blue jeans, served champagne, and was described as looking young. The encounter extended the evening beyond the stage, where the blackout had made an ordinary passage through the theater memorable in its own right.

The planned interview did not take place at the theater: Warhol later went with Ginsburg and a friend of Worth’s to the friend’s apartment, where he conducted it. That shift gives the Vivian Beaumont Theater a precise place in the episode. It is where the appointment first takes shape, where the performance absorbs the blackout rather than yielding to it, and where the night’s unusual public drama precedes a more private conversation.