The Blue Theater

"It had always been a dream of mine to have a place to make theatre and art and show films," says bespectacled Blue Theater owner Ron Berry. "I had been talking with a friend from Blue Genie Art, and so when the vacant garage next to them became available we jumped on it."

The space Berry's talking about lies back from the road just east of the Springdale & Seventh Street intersection, surrounded by an imposing Goodwill warehouse and the Skagen-Brakhage Blue Genie Art haven. Set behind a chainlink fence and sporting a massive "Blue Theater" mural across its brick face, the theatre's Eastside locale belies the single-minded artistic drive within. Featuring two separate performance spaces (one roughly 75 seats, the other 25) and a full complement of sound and lighting rigs, the theatre comfortably fills the niche between downtown's marginally more upscale Hideout theatre and coffeehouse and the Vortex on Manor.

Since opening a year ago, the Blue Theater has played host to a continuing series of performances from a stripped-down, multimedia version of Kafka's The Metamorphosis to Cinemaker Co-op, Cinematexas, and Flicker Film Festival events.

"We're really hoping to start writing some grants soon because as it is it's being entirely funded by me," says Berry. "And there's just so much more that I want to do here, from film to theatre and whatever else comes along. That's the great part: You really have no idea what you're going to see when you come here."