At its opening on August 30, 1918, Schwartz's company was housed at the
Irving Place Theatre in
Union Square, Manhattan. It performed there for three theater seasons. Over these first years the company presented works by playwrights including
Leonid Andreyev,
S. Ansky,
Sholem Aleichem,
Jacob Gordin,
Maxim Gorky,
Peretz Hirschbein,
David Pinski,
Arthur Schnitzler,
George Bernard Shaw and
Oscar Wilde. Their tenancy there was brief, as the next year the Yiddish Art Theatre moved to its own purpose-built theater: the
Louis N. Jaffe Theater, a
Moorish Revival theater on
Second Avenue in the heart of the
Yiddish Theatre District which Brooklyn developer and prominent Jewish community leader Louis Jaffe had built in 1925–1926 to house the company. Over that time it performed classics of Yiddish, European and English theater, ranging from works by Sholem Aleichem to William Shakespeare. ==References==