Local entertainment buffs have their choice of nearly 80 big screens where they can view the latest movies, and the number of megaplexes is growing all the time.

Fans of live theater have only about a half-dozen local venues where they can experience the power of drama at close range, but drama options are declining with the cancellation of the Star Bar Players’ latest season.

Manitou Art Theater founders Jim Jackson and Birgitta De Pree have spent the past decade as ambassadors for drama, creating powerful and original productions and taking them to audiences of children and adults who might otherwise never experience the power of theater.

Their specialty since founding Manitou Art Theater in 2001 is creating productions that are so intimate you can feel the air currents swirl as actors move around the stage.

“We really like theater that moves people to laughter or tears,” says Jackson, who helped create the theater’s motto: “Great theater happens in small places.”

“Exactly,” De Pree says. “We create shows where the audience really does matter and where it’s hard for people to sit back and be passive.

“We really love it when kids and adults react during a melodrama production, yelling out to the villain, ‘Don’t do it!’ That kind of entertainment is exciting. It’s something people want to talk about after the show.”

The theater’s 2008-2009 Kid’s First season opened Oct. 4 with a new play and a new location – on Pecan Street on Colorado Springs’ west side. “Bowl of Dust,” a play created by De Pree, takes children into the Dust Bowl desperation experienced by characters similar to those in the novel “The Grapes of Wrath,” which the Pikes Peak Library District chose as the latest title in the All Pikes Peak Reads program.

On opening day, the theater was dealing with its own dust, as well as paint, concrete and wires. Remodeling work forced “Bowl of Dust” to premiere in a smaller space in the theater. But longtime Manitou Art Theater fan Natalie Crow-Gray didn’t mind.

“It was fun,” says Crow-Gray, who has been taking her two children to the theater’s productions since 2004. “They are very resourceful, and they will be able to pull it off.”

“Their performances always open up a new world to us and help us to think outside the box.”

The move from Manitou has been hard work, but Jackson and De Pree say it was important.

The Manitou Art Theater was the first troupe to open shop in the Business of Art Center in Manitou Springs. But rising rents, an expanded take of ticket revenues by the center, and the quest for a more perfect performance space led Jackson and De Pree to their new facility on Pecan Street, which is a block away from 21st street on the city’s west side.

“Drama depends on space,” Jackson says.

Their new facility has the space, including a dressing room for actors and plenty of places where audience members can hang out before and after the shows.

“If you don’t have access to the space you need to make it work, it just doesn’t happen,” says Jackson, who believes the theater’s new performance space will be ready to go when the first adult show of the new season opens on Thursday.

“It Goes Without Saying,” which has garnered raves from The New York Times, features actor and mime Bill Bowers in a series of touching and humorous autobiographical segments that explore the importance of silence in our noisy, chaotic times.

By the time the current season wraps up in May, it will have produced more than 100 performances, including Jackson’s award-winning one-man show, “Hut!” along with a variety of workshops and classes for kids and adults. Tickets for some of the shows are cheaper than tickets to the latest flick at the megaplex.

It’s been a long and winding road for Jackson, a professional clown and circus performer, and De Pree, an actor and director. The two met in Denver in 1999 while serving on a panel exploring ways artists could perform their work for young people in schools.

When they married in 2001, they made a commitment to each other, and to the belief that art and drama could survive and thrive in a small drama market like the Springs. They’ve succeeded thus far with a combination of creativity and grit, both on stage and off. (For example, Jackson found the new theater’s seats on Craigslist and drove out to California to get them.)

“We felt we could be together and have creative lives in Colorado Springs,” Jackson says. “We knew living or working in a city like New York or Los Angeles would pose challenges. There are different kinds of challenges here, but the theater is an anchor for us and for others in the community.”

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