Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 01:11:00

Follow the neon sign down below the Memorial Arts Building and you reach the room where Atlanta's Tony-winning theatre takes its risks. The Hertz Stage, in the Woodruff Arts Center complex at 1280 Peachtree Street NE in Midtown Atlanta, is the Alliance Theatre's 200-seat underground black box - the experimental counterpart to the company's Coca-Cola mainstage upstairs. The room's design is its philosophy: a fully flexible black box that reconfigures for each production - thrust, arena, alley or traverse - with general-admission seating that puts no audience member more than a few rows from the actors. The Hertz Stage Series programs the bolder end of the Alliance's season: new American plays, intimate musicals, solo shows and work too raw or close-range for an 650-seat proscenium. The stakes are real because of who is upstairs: the Alliance, founded in 1968, is the Southeast's leading producing theatre and a Regional Theatre Tony Award winner whose premieres have repeatedly transferred to Broadway. The Hertz functions as its development engine - many works that later fill the mainstage or move to New York get their first full staging in this basement, in front of audiences close enough to change the show. The address multiplies the value of a ticket: the Woodruff Arts Center campus also houses the High Museum of Art, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and the Alliance's other stages, making the Hertz one corner of the densest cultural block in the South. Logistics: MARTA's Arts Center station is directly across the street, the campus garage elevators on level P4 open near the theatre entrance, and the room's general-admission policy rewards early arrival - the front rows of a Hertz show are among the best theatre seats in Atlanta. The numbers behind the pipeline are striking: the Alliance has premiered more than 100 new works in its history, and Hertz-scale productions have fed shows to Broadway, off-Broadway and regional stages across the country - the Kendeda National Graduate Playwriting Competition, which the Alliance has run since 2004, gives one emerging playwright a full professional production each season, most often on this stage, making the basement room one of the few places in America where a graduate student's first professional play gets a Tony-winning company behind it.