Two large angels hung above the orchestra and the theater’s neogothic wood paneling and the boxes, with their iron railings, looked like confessionals (the building had, in fact, once been a chapel). The smallest theater in Paris, it was also the most atypical. In 1897, the French playwright Oscar Metenier, bought a theater at the end of the impasse Chaptal, a cul-de-sac in Paris’ Pigalle district, in which to produce his controversial naturalist plays.
