Dock Street Theatre opened in 1736 as America’s first playhouse

On 12 February 1736, an audience gathered on this corner for a production of George Farquhar's play The Recruiting Officer. The building they entered was the first in America put up for the sole purpose of staging plays. Queen Street was called Dock Street then, which gave the playhouse its name. That original building was probably destroyed four years later, when the Great Fire of 1740 burned through this part of town.

In 1809, the Planter's Hotel went up on the empty site, fronting Church Street. Touring theatre companies stayed in its rooms. In 1838, the actor Junius Brutus Booth—father of Edwin Booth and John Wilkes Booth—stayed here while performing at the Charleston New Theatre. One night after a performance, he attacked the hotel's manager and came close to killing him.

By the 1930s the hotel stood derelict. Turning it back into a theatre became the first project of Franklin Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration. Between 1935 and 1937, the Charleston architects Albert Simons and Samuel Lapham directed a $350,000 reconstruction. They placed a new auditorium and stage house inside the hotel's old open courtyard, modelling the room on eighteenth-century London playhouses.

Local carpenters on Depression relief finished the interior using native black cypress grown and milled nearby. The woodwork and mantelpieces in the second-floor drawing room were salvaged from the Radcliffe-King mansion of about 1799, which stood at George and Meeting Streets and was pulled down under another WPA project to build a gymnasium for the College of Charleston.

On 26 November 1937, the rebuilt theatre opened its doors. For the opening night, the company staged The Recruiting Officer, the same play that had launched the original playhouse on the site 201 years earlier.