From Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? onwards Edward Albee chose to present his plays on Broadway. After all, was this not synonymous with the American theatre? He remained loyal to that decision even when the public response scarcely seemed to justify it. Tiny Alice fared poorly, while even his Pulitzer Prize-winning A Delicate Balance ran for only 132 performances. Others received more peremptory treatment: Malcolm and The Ballad of the Sad Cafe folded after brief runs, The Lady from Dubuque ran for twelve performances, Lolita and The Man with Three Arms failed ignominiously. Broadway could be inhospitable to innovation and experiment. Increasingly this was banished to the scatter of small theatres, church halls, lofts and basements of Off and Off-Off Broadway.

Broadway did not, however, cease to exist. Albee was not the only writer to persist with it. Arthur Miller opened The Price there in 1968 and The Creation of the World and Other Business a few years later (it lost a quarter of a million dollars). Michael Cristofer staged The Shadow Box in 1976. It remained a magnet, attracting writers, actors and directors, but now plays were likely to receive their first performances not in the over-large and over-priced theatres of mid-town New York but elsewhere. Arthur Kopit's Indians opened in London and received its American premiere at the Arena Stage in Washington before moving to Broadway, where it had a run of ninety-six performances and that for an original work which managed simultaneously to engage history and to make an oblique comment on the deeply flawed enterprise of Vietnam.