Resource Directory: Theater

Santa Fe Performing Arts (SFPA), devoted to educational and professional theatre in New Mexico, utilizing performing arts as a powerful tool for educating the youth in our community, developing a professional Adult Resident Company dedicated to innovation and excellence, and providing the community with a performing arts center that is affordable and fosters professionalism. Santa Fe Performing Arts school delivers comprehensive, educational, on-site and outreach programs for children and teens in all of the performing arts disciplines. The adult theatre program is a resident company committed to professional excellence with an emphasis on the development of new works. The performing arts center - the Armory For The Arts Theatre - provides the community with an affordable performing arts facility and collaboration center.

Famed writer, Mary Austin incorporated the Playhouse in 1922 as the Santa Fe Little Theatre. Celebrating and preserving the richness and texture of the Anglo, Native American and Spanish cultures through live theatre is what Mary Austin envisioned. The Playhouse has stayed true to this vision since 1922, earning it the distinction of being the oldest continuously running theatre west of the Mississippi.

Teatro Paraguas promotes Hispanic and Latino poetry, literature and theater through bilingual presentations of classic and contemporary works, celebrating the history, richness and diversity of Hispanic and Latino cultures.

Theater Grottesco was founded in 1983 in Paris.  Theater Grottesco has created 11 full-length plays and over 30 shorter pieces, performed in 7 countries, 30 states, most major U.S. cities and hundreds of smaller communities, garnering international and national awards. 

In 1996, Theater Grottesco moved to northern New Mexico to join an artistic community which had welcomed the company on three early U.S. tours. Grottesco is now a leader in the Santa Fe performing arts community. The company’s most intensive professional training and educational residencies are local. On-going youth, semi-professional and professional trainings along with open rehearsals displaying an intricate, deliberate and classically informed artistic process are attended by the city’s most promising and upcoming artists. They are also fertile ground for artists from other disciplines, audience members who value the exploration of creation and performance, and youth from all backgrounds.

THEATERWORK is actively engaged in culture-building through its performance work, its attention to the creative development of its artists, associates, apprentices and the communities which surround and sustain it. Cultures – when they are strong – are open, roomy, generous and celebratory. A theater has to be part of that. The theatrical experience – whether on stages or in hospital rooms – strives to re-ignite a sense of the common good… the common ground.