The vision that launched the theatre’s current success took root in its earliest days, when Dempster’s group of renegades took over a condemned Manhattan office building and turned it into a magnet for the country’s top theatre talent, producing up to six new plays each season. Holtham, who ran the Youngblood program under Dempster. They put it back on the map,” says member playwright J. “Billy and his team have really stabilized EST. Members credit the strong leadership provided by Carden in the years since Dempster’s death. The 45-year-old institution has reinvented itself for a new era with startling speed. Today, EST has finally paid off a half-million-dollar debt and, more important, is producing buzz-generating new work. Then, after years of struggling to keep the theatre he founded alive, in 2007 the company’s founder Curt Dempster committed suicide. In January 2003, a former employee embezzled $48,000 from the EST coffers, and that loss, in tandem with a property loan on the company’s summer retreat, threatened to bankrupt the theatre. It was not long ago, though, that Ensemble Studio Theatre was on the brink of collapse. Sloan Project to develop new plays about science and technology. I’ve always felt that was here.” On a recent spring day, Carden presides over an impossibly hyperactive programming schedule-mainstage and workshop productions, readings, commissions, a seemingly endless array of programming from EST/Youngblood (a program for playwrights under 30) and the Alfred P. “That’s what excites me, providing opportunity. “I believe in what people can do,” says artistic director William Carden, an EST member since 1978. The company’s productions now number into the thousands. This initially nondescript structure is the home of Ensemble Studio Theatre, founded in 1968 to develop and produce new American plays. It leads to a flight of concrete stairs that opens into a 74-seat theatre in a former furniture factory. On Manhattan’s West 52nd Street, in the neighborhood long known as Hell’s Kitchen, there is an unmarked industrial door.

Ensemble studios support