The Triangle Club evolved from the Princeton College Dramatic Association, which changed its name to Triangle Club in 1893, ten years after its founding. To provide a home for the Triangle Club--its early performances were staged in University Hall's dining room--Booth Tarkington 1893 initiated a campaign that raised funds for a small building erected in 1895. For more than a quarter of a century the modest structure, which was called the Casino, served as a home for club rehearsals and local performances, as a place for dances, tennis, and bowling, and as an armory for a local company of the National Guard. After the Casino burned down in January 1924, it was rebuilt in 1930 and named the Thomas N. McCarter Theater.

The Triangle Club was often the launching pad for many well-known theatrical personalities. Best known among them were Joshua Logan '31, James Stewart '32, and Jose Ferrer '33. Myron McCormick '31, was a comic hit in Logan's "South Pacific," and Clark Gesner '60, was the author of the popular off-Broadway musical "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown."

With the advent of coeducation in 1969, the Triangle Club was able to assign to women the female roles formerly taken by men. In the chorus lines, however, the club on occasion managed to enjoy the best of the old and new worlds by having men portray women.

What Triangle has meant to generations of undergraduates was summed up by Joshua Logan in the foreword to its history, The Long Kickline by Donald Marsden '64, which the club's Board of Trustees brought out in 1968: ". . . The Triangle Club, smiling like a basketful of cats, lives on as though it had nine-times-nine lives. It is the Great Vitrine for youth, the Bulletin Board for young ideas, the proving ground for talent that still is permitted to fumble; it is a place to sing, to do pratfalls, to thumb one's nose at authority, to test the last liberties of adolescence, to taste the true wine of being an American."

Based on notes by George S. Stephenson