Still very active and growing, the Arena Players, Inc. is the country’s oldest continually performing African American community theater. The theater, functioning “to liberate Black people,” predates the national Black theater and arts movement.
After almost a decade of temporary stages, in 1960, Arena finds a permanent home in Baltimore’s Orchard Street neighborhood. With substantial federal, state and local grants, it opens a 300-seat theater to critical acclaim in 1976.
Improvements to the three-story building have continued, and today Arena Players, Inc. produces several productions a year, jazz and comedy shows, and a youth and adult theater training program in drama, music and dance.
The Arena Players mission remains to “entertain, educate and serve the Baltimore community,” Its long time artistic director, Donald Owens, is convinced that good theater can exist anywhere and is “like life itself, changing over the decades.”
