B Street Theatre is building a new foundation

After more than a decade of preparation, the walls are rising at the B Street Theatre’s new Midtown home at 27th Street and Capitol Avenue, and the project is finally looking like a building.The new 40,000-square-foot project will ultimately cost nearly $30 million to build, and it will have two performance spaces, with 365 seats and 250 seats respectively—more than doubling the original location’s audience capacity. The theater company is also updating its union contract with Actors’ Equity to reflect this growth. The new stages will have features that B Street has lacked until now: trap space (allowing actors to “pop up”), fly space (which allows scenery to “fly down”) and wing space (on the sides).

“It will give us the opportunity to do different kinds of plays,” said Buck Busfield, B Street’s producing artistic director. “For years, we’ve had to chuck some good scripts because we didn’t have the right space to do them. Now, we will be able to pick some of these scripts.”

The company will also host some live music and dance events.

“We want it to be a home for all the arts,” Busfield said. But, the director also stressed, B Street’s orientation won’t change.

“We are still going to be an actor-driven, story-driven company; we will never do a play just to wow people with technical stuff,” he said.

Like all outdoor projects, B Street’s construction was delayed by the recent long winter rains. They now plan to open the new venue in February 2018.